The 



Mind of Tennyson 



HIS THOUGHTS ON GOD, FREEDOM, 
AND IMMORTALITY 



E. HERSHEY SNEATH, Ph.D. 

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN YALE UNIVERSITY 



"We have but faith: we cannot know" 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1900 



rV^O COPIES RECEIVED. 

Library of COBgret^ 
Offlcfl of tb» 

^^,^r^ « WAV 5. 1900 

SECOND OOPY, 



Copyright, igoo 
By Charles Scribner's Sons 



58718 



UNIVERSITY PRESS • JOHN WILSON 
AND SON • CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 



TO 

MY FATHER AND MOTHER 



PREFACE 

THE aim of this little book is to in- 
terpret and systematise Tennyson's 
thoughts on God, Freedom, and Immortal- 
ity. Great care has been taken not to 
force the interpretation in any manner, but 
to determine as nearly as possible just 
what the poet thought on these " inevita- 
ble questions." To this end special effort 
has been made to distinguish between the 
subjective and objective, — the personal 
and impersonal, — in his poetry ; also, to 
make due allowance for metaphor and 
poetic license. The interpretation has, of 
course, been made in the light of Tenny- 
son's relation to the spirit of his age. 

Tennyson was such a consummate artist 
that a large number of his readers are, 
very naturally, more interested in the form 
than in the substance of his poetry. He 
was, however, a poet with " a conscience 



mii Preface 

and an aim," and the aim was primarily 
an ethical one. He had something to say 
which he deemed to be of vital import in 
its bearing on human life and conduct. 
Therefore, a knowledge of his " message " 
is necessary to an adequate understanding 
and appreciation of both the poet and 
his art, — whatever of value we may attri- 
bute to the message itself That this little 
book will contribute to this end, is the 
earnest hope of the author. 

E. H. S. 



CONTENTS 

Page 
Introduction r 

God 28 

Freedom 76 

Immortality 106 



THE 

MIND OF TENNYSON 

INTRODUCTION 

The truths that never can be proved. 

In Metnoriam, cxxxi., 3. 

The faith, the vigour, bold to dwell 
On doubts that drive the coward back. 

I/i Metnoriant, xcv., 8. 

npENNYSON, throughout the greater 
-*- part of his life, was greatly inter- 
ested in the problems of philosophy. 
They constituted one of the main sources 
of his poetical inspiration, and occupy 
a conspicuous place in the productions 
of his genius. Early in his career as 
a poet, we find him engaged in a con- 
test with scepticism concerning them. 
This is manifest in the poem entitled, 
Supposed Confessions of a Second-Rate Sen- 
sitive Mind. A little later, in The Two 



2 The Mind of Tennyson 

Voices, he considers the problem of the 
worth of human life. Again, in Tlie 
Palace of Art, he reflects upon important 
aspects of moral life and theory. In the 
Higher Pantheism, he treats of the ulti- 
mate nature of reality, and of the rela- 
tion of the finite to the Infinite — two of 
the most fundamental problems of meta- 
physics. In /// Mevioriavi, he meditates 
long and seriously upon the great prob- 
lems of God and immortality; upon the 
mysterious realities of sin and suffering; 
upon the problems of knowledge, — its 
origin, nature, reality, development, ex- 
tent; its distinction from faith, — almost 
unconsciously constructing a kind of phi- 
losophy of life. In the Idylls of the Kiiig, 
the 

"old imperfect tale, 
New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul," 

"the spiritually central lines" concern 
the reality of God, the finite spirit, and 
immortality. In De Profundis, we have 
thoughts upon the mystery of birth, in 



Introduction j 

which he hints at the pre-existence of 

the soul ; and also upon the mystery of 
personality, — ■ 

" this main-miracle, that thou art thou, 
With power on thine own act and on the world." 

In T/ie Aiicietit Sage, he opposes mate- I 
rialistic and agnostic views of God and 
immortality, and presents suggestions 
concerning the value of proof in the 
domain of fundamentals, — pointing out 
the limits of proof, and the province and 
value of faith. In Despair, he reveals his 
knowledge and opinions of a cold and 
heartless theology on the one hand, and 
an atheistic and agnostic philosophy on 
the other, — of the severe creeds of the 
"know-all chapel," and the "horrible in- 
fidel writings," or "know-nothing books," 
of " the new dark ages. " In T/ie Promise 
of May, he strikes at some of the promi- 
nent philosophical tendencies of the age 
as they bear upon human conduct. In 
Vastness, the subject of immortality is 



/f. The Mind of Tennyson 

again under consideration. Finally, in 
poems like those entitled, By an Evobition- 
ist. The Dawn, and TJic Making of Man, 
he reflects upon the ultimate goal of man's 
evolution. Thus we see, that almost from 
the beginning to the end of his poetical 
career, Tennyson was earnestly interested 
in, and concerned with, the deeper and 
profounder problems of the human mind. 
Nor are we dependent upon internal 
evidence alone to convince us of the truth 
of this statement. There is a large 
amount of external evidence which estab- 
lishes it beyond a doubt. In the Mernoir,'^ 
recently published by Hallam Lord Ten- 
nyson, we are told that a group of friends, 
of which Tennyson was one, who consti- 
tuted the "Apostles'" club, of Cambridge, 
during his university career, "read their 
Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Butler, Hume, 
Bentham, Descartes, and Kant, and dis- 
cussed such questions as the Origin of 

1 Alfred Lord Tennyson : A Memoir by his Son. 
New York, 1897. Vol. i., pp. 43, 44. 



Introduction 5 

Evil, the Derivation of Moral Senti- 
ments, Prayer, and the Personality of 
God." We are further informed, that 
" soon after his marriage he took to read- 
ing different systems of philosophy," and 
that " Spinoza, Berkeley, Kant, Schlegel, 
Fichte, Hegel, Ferrier, were among the 
books added to his library."^ Again, we 
learn, that he was one of the founders of 
the Metaphysical Society of Great Brit- 
ain, established for the discussion of fun- 
damental questions of the Christian faith. 
It was composed of adherents and oppo- 
nents of the Faith. Among its members 
were such distinguished philosophical 
thinkers as Martineau, Hodgson, Sidg- 
wick, Fraser, and Groom Robertson ; such 
prominent biblical and theological schol- 
ars as Maurice, Stanley, Mozley, and 
Alford ; such notable men of science as 
Huxley, Tyndall, Sir John Lubbock, and 
St. George Mivart ; such renowned men 
of letters as Tennyson, Hutton, Ruskin, 

1 Memoir, vol. i., p. 308. 



6 ■ The Mind of Tennyson 

and Froude.^ Dr. Martineau tells us, that 
some of the subjects discussed in the 
meetings when Tennyson was present 
were, "The Common-sense Philosophy of 
Causation, " " Is there any Axiom of Causa- 
tion?" "The Relativity of Knowledge," 
"The Emotion of Conviction," "What is 
Death ? " " The Supposed Necessity for 
Seeking a Solution of Ultimate Meta- 
physical Problems," " The Five Idols of the 
Theatre," "Utilitarianism," and "Double 
Truth. "^ Again, in his letter-diary, we 
find, under date of Dec. 14, 1865, that he 
had called on Tyndall "and had a long 
chat with him about mind and matter, 
etc. "^ In Lady Tenn3'son's Journal, 
under date of August 17, 1866, she writes 
that " A. [Alfred] and Edmund [Lushing- 
ton] talked metaphysics. They have en- 
grossed A. much of late."* Tennyson's 
son informs us, that "the philosophers of 

1 Memoir, vol. ii., pp. i66, 167. 

2 Ibid., pp. 170, 171. 
8 Ibid., p. 32. 

* Ibid., p. 39. 



Introduction ^ 

the East had a great fascination " for his 
father/ Akbar s Dream is a testimony to 
this fact. Finally, Locker-Lampson, 
Lecky, Jowett, Tyndall, and the Duke of 
Argyll, in their contributions to the Me- 
vioir, all bear witness to Tennyson's great 
interest in the questions of speculative 
thought. 

The causes of this peculiar interest in 
the problems of philosophy are not diffi- 
cult to determine. In the first place, it 
was due, in a measure, to poetic tempera- 
ment. The poet is essentially a man of 
reflection, and this at once puts him in 
touch with the almost permanent mood of 
the philosopher; and very naturally leads 
him to the subject-matter of philosophy. 
Again, the aesthetic nature is one of the 
main sources of philosophy itself. It has 
its ideals of the beautiful and sublime, and 
posits an objective reality as their Ground. 
In its more refined and profound moods 
the aesthetic nature is led on to the recog- 

1 Memoir, vol. ii., p. 388. 



8 The Mind of Tennyson 

nition of a Supreme Reality, which is the 
perfect embodiment or realisation of abso- 
lute beauty. It is an interesting fact to 
note, that the ontological argument for the 
being and nature of God, which argues the 
existence of a Perfect Being from the nec- 
essary Idea of the Perfect within the mind, 
has, in a measure, its roots in the aesthetic 
nature of man. It is equally worthy of 
note, that the teleological argument for 
the intelligence of the Deity, based on 
the apparent adaptation of means to ends, 
order and harmony, beauty and proportion, 
in the world, has its roots also in the con- 
stitutional aestheticism of man. It is not, 
then, a matter of wonder that poets like 
Sophocles and Lucretius, Dante and 
Milton, Shakespeare and Goethe, Words- 
worth and Shelley, Browning and Tenny- 
son, have found much in the problems of 
philosophy to engage their attention and 
to inspire their genius. 

But poetic temperament was not the 
only cause of Tennyson's interest in 



Introdiiction g 

these great questions. Another cause 
was his severe struggle with his own 
doubts, and with the doubts of his age. 
He was not a " born-believer. " Constitu- 
tionally he was not predisposed to take 
things on authority, but rather to inquire 

" into the laws 
Of life and death, and things that seem, 
And things that be, and analyse 
Our double nature, and compare 
All creeds till we have found the one, 
If one there be." 

There was a long and bitter struggle with 
his own questionings, and a noble endeavor 
to get a solid footing with reference to 
the "Eternal Verities." This personal 
struggle received a tremendous impulse 
through the loss of his much-loved friend, 
Arthur Henry Hallam. He himself tells 
us, — 

" Like Paul with beasts, I fought with Death." 

He fought with those doubts which death 
usually suggests concerning the reality of 
God, and his divine Fatherhood; the 



JO The Mind of Tennyson 

meaning and worth of human life, and 
the final destiny of the human spirit. 
All through those seventeen years — the 
period covered in writing In Memoriam — 
a soul knowing "its own bitterness," 
wrapped in profound meditation, tried 
manfully to beat back its own scepticism 
by patient, earnest inquiry into the 
rational grounds for believing that God 
is; that He is personal; that He is essen- 
tial Justice and Love; that life, with its 
love and duty, has intrinsic worth and 
meaning; that destiny is something 
loftier than the dust. It was a sub- 
lime struggle, and a triumphant out- 
come, as the prologue to In Memoriam 
testifies. 1 

Then, too, the age was an age of active 
questioning and doubt — and, indeed, in a 
large measure, of positive denial. Science 
was making tremendous progress, and, as 
is more or less characteristic of such 

1 The prologue bears the date 1849. In Memoriam 
was published 1850. 



Introduction n 

periods, although not necessarily so, 
Materialism attended her advance. The 
mechanical conception of the world, 
recognising only necessary sequence in 
the explanation of phenomena, was con- 
spicuous in scientific and philosophic 
thought. This view was supposed by 
many to bear strongly against the teleo- 
logical argument for the intelligence of 
the World-Ground, and against the reality 
of self-determining spirit. 

" And as of old from Sinai's top 

God said that God is One, 
By Science strict so speaks He now 

To tell us, There is None ! 
Earth goes by chemic forces ; Heaven 's 

A Mdcanique Cdleste ! 
And heart and mind of human kind 

A watch-work as the rest ! " * 

Again, the theory of the correlation of 
forces was almost universally accepted 
among students of science, — at least, so 
far as it referred to physical and chemical 
forces. It did not take long to extend it 
1 Arthur Hugh Clough, The New Sinai, 



12 The Mind of Tennyson 

to the domain of life, and it required but 
one step more to apply it to the psychic 
realm — the realm of consciousness. This 
theory, as applied to life and mind, favored 
Materialism, and very naturally raised 
serious doubts as to the existence of a 
Supreme Spirit called God; as to whether 
men, in the final analysis, are anything 
more than highly organised matter, or 
"cunning casts in clay." 

Furthermore, the theory of organic evo- 
lution was widely accepted in the scientific 
world. Its claims concerning the origin 
of species, especially man, were so at 
variance with previous and contemporary 
theological opinion that, for a while, they 
caused grave anxiety in the world of re- 
ligious thought and belief. Man being so 
completely a part of Nature, as this theory 
indicates, and seems to substantiate by 
exceedingly convincing lines of evidence, 
what about his relations to the Supernat- 
ural.? With such an apparently low 
origin, what about the divine stamp — the 



Introduction ij 

image of God — which the Christian world 
has always supposed him to bear ? With 
such a low ancestry, and therefore such a 
common nature, how about his claims on 
immortality ? Does not acceptance of this 
theory, it was asked, compromise the great 
beliefs on these questions in which the 
Christian soul has wrought and rested 
through the ages? 

Again, Darwin's explanation of evolu- 
tion, largely from the standpoint of natural 
selection, involving a dreadful struggle 
for existence, delivered a staggering blow 
to faith in the goodness and love of God. 
Nature, 

" red in tooth and claw, 
With ravine shriek'd against his creed." 

These were some of the questions which 
the progress of science raised in the minds 
of thoughtful men. And, indeed, it is 
not surprising that many minds, resting 
serenely in an inherited belief, were 
shaken out of their "dogmatic slumber," 
only to be plunged into serious doubt and 
scepticism. 



/^ The Mind of Tennyson 

Nor was the trend of philosophical 
thought in this age more favorable to posi- 
tive acceptance of the so-called "funda- 
mental truths," but rather against it. 
Two conspicuous tendencies characterise 
the philosophy of this period : Sensation- 
alism and Transcendentalism. Sensa- 
tionalism, on its ontological side, that is, 
on the side of being, means that, so far as 
the ultimate nature of the human mind 
is concerned, it is nothing more than 
a bundle of sensations. ^ All of man's 
higher mental activities are ultimately 
reducible to sensations, grouped accord- 
ing to certain laws of association. Hence 
man, so far as his psychical being is con- 
cerned, is only — 

" A willy-nilly current of sensations." 

^ It takes essentially the position which Hume 
took several centuries ago : " But setting aside some 
metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm 
of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a 
bundle or collection of different perceptions, which 
succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and 
are in a perpetual flux and movement." — A Treatise 
of Human Nature, vol. i., pt. iv., sec. vi. 



Introduction /j* 

This, of course, cancels the reality of the 
soul as a distinct, unitary agent or subject 
of conscious states. In this denial of 
the reality of mind was involved, as a 
matter of course, the denial of its freedom 
and immortality; for, under such circum- 
stances, there is no mind to be free and 
immortal. 

These were the implications of Sensa- 
tionalism viewed from an ontological 
standpoint. When we look at it from 
an epistemological standpoint, that is, 
from the side of knowledge, the result 
is equally significant. Its logical impli- 
cation, as well as its professed position, is 
Phenomenalism — which means Agnosti- 
cism. Knowledge does not extend beyond 
phenomena. It is limited to things as 
they appear to us through the senses, and 
does not reach to reality as it is in itself. 
The ultimate nature of things cannot be 
known. What this means with reference 
to our knowlege of God is, of course, 
apparent. God is, according to this 



i6 The Mind of Tennyson 

theory, "the Unknown and the Unknow- 
able," In short, Sensationalism, on the 
side of being, cancels the reality, freedom, 
and immortality of finite spirit; and, on 
the side of knowing, shuts us out from the 
domain of reality — dooming us to a hope- 
less Agnosticism with reference to Infinite 
Spirit. 

Nor do we fare any better at the hands 
of the more subtle and refined Transcen- 
dentalism of the age. This was an inheri- 
tance from Kant, through his immortal 
work. The Critique of Pure Reason. It, 
too, is Phenomenalism and Agnosticism 
— but of a different character. Kant 
held that things are known to us under 
the subjective forms of sense-intuition — 
space and time. He further held, that 
the categories of the understanding, — 
cause and effect, subject and attribute, 
etc., — which unite our sense-objects, are 
also subjective, that is, do not apply 
to things-in-themselves. So that we can 
only know things as they appear to us 



Introduction ly 

under these forms and categories, and 
not as they really are. Furthermore, 
not only has sense its native forms, and 
understanding its a priori categories, but 
reason has its native ideas — the Soul, 
the World, and God. Their function or 
office is to unify the judgments of the 
understanding. They do not apply to 
reality — they also are merely subjective. 
If we apply them to reality, we fall into 
hopeless contradiction. The outcome of 
Kant's Critique is the destruction of 
the foundations of Rational Psychology, 
Rational Cosmology, and Rational The- 
ology. Now, this Transcendentalism, in- 
volving the most formidable scepticism 
in the history of speculative thought, 
appeared later, in modified forms, in the 
works of some of Tennyson's contempo- 
raries. The depressing and demoralising 
effect of such teaching is apparent when 
we remember that it shuts out God, the 
human soul, and its destiny, from the 
knowledge of man by the very constitution 



i8 The Mind of Tennyson 

of human knowledge itself. How pro- 
foundly Tennyson was affected by these 
views, will be seen when we examine his 
teaching on the subjects of God, Freedom, 
and Immortality. 

The religious world, also, was greatly 
agitated by important movements which 
"had a tendency to shake the confidence of 
many in the authority of the Scriptures, 
and the validity of traditional dogma. 
Quite early in Tennyson's age we have 
the liberal movement of the early Oriel 
School. It involved an attack on the 
infallible authority of the Church and 
the Sacred Scriptures. Both Archbishop 
Whately and Thomas Arnold — represen- 
tatives of this movement — assailed the 
doctrine of apostolic succession; and the 
latter denied the dogma of Scriptural 
inerrancy, anticipating, also, some of the 
positions of the later so-called "Higher 
Criticism." On the other hand, we have 
the celebrated Oxford movement, led by 
Newman and others, representing an 



Introduction ig 

essentially opposite trend. It was a 
movement in the direction of the infalli- 
ble authority of the Church, and ultra 
conceptions and beliefs concerning the 
saving efficacy of the sacraments. One 
movement emphasises the authority of 
reason, and the other, the authority of 
the Church, in things religious. Later, 
there is another liberal movement repre- 
sented by such men as Frederic Denison 
Maurice and F. W. Robertson, — a de- 
parture from the rigidity of traditional 
theology, with the usual controversy and 
persecution which such movements call 
forth. 

Again, we meet with the celebrated 
"Essays and Reviews" controversy. On 
the liberal side, we have a number of 
papers, independently prepared by dif- 
ferent writers, containing many views in 
harmony with the spirit and results of 
the "Higher Criticism." The weakness 
of the dogmas of inspiration and inerrancy 
of the Scriptures is pointed out. The 



20 The Mind of Tennyson 

traditional views of miracles are opposed, 
and the irreconcilableness of the Mosaic 
cosmogony with the views of modern sci- 
ence is affirmed. This series of " Essays " 
provoked controversy; and there is a re- 
joinder in the form of another series, 
likewise independently written, represent- 
ing more conservative positions. Still 
later, we find the methods and results of 
the "Higher Criticism" gaining ground, 
and traditional theology retreating gradu- 
ally under the tremendous pressure of 
a more liberal and more enlightened 
thought. 
y Now, controversy, and especially re- 
ligious and theological controversy, is 
usually apt to be fruitful of doubt. It 
very naturally raises the question in many 
minds as to the possibility of getting any 
stable and reliable basis for knowledge 
and faith; as to whether there be any- 
thing "final" in this domain; and 
whether, after all. Agnosticism be not 
the most rational, as well as the most 



Introduction 21 

reverent, attitude toward the fundamen- 
tals of religion. Such undoubtedly were 
the results in Tennyson's age. And the 
movement in the religious world during 
this period was very closely related to the 
tendencies in the scientific and philo- 
sophical worlds previously described. If 
science and philosophy throw doubt upon 
the so-called "Eternal Verities" with 
which the Christian religion is especially 
concerned, some might say, we can still 
fall back upon the authority of the Church 
and Holy Scripture. But with the infal- 
lible authority of these impeached by the 
results of reverent Christian scholarship 
itself, what course is left to the troubled 
and inquiring mind.'' Agnosticism was 
the reply which many serious-minded 
men gave to the question. 

Now, Tennyson was profoundly in touch 
with his age. There were not many men 
who understood it better than he. He 
had his finger on its pulse, and his ear 
upon its breast ; so that he heard its very 



22 The Mind of Tennyson 

heart-beat. He was acquainted with its 
problems., and he knew also the tremen- 
dous issues involved in the attitude of his 
age toward them. On the side of being, 

^ a crass Materialism cancels the reality of 
a personal God, a self-determining spirit, 
and an immortal soul. On the side of 
knowledge, a helpless Agnosticism ex- 
cludes us from their presence. It tells 
us we have erected our altars to an Un- 
known God, whom, or which, we have 
been ignorantly worshipping. It affirms, 
also, constitutional impotency of man in 
dealing with his reality and immortal- 

- ity as a personal spirit, j Tennyson had 
an almost morbid appreciation of the 
vital significance of belief in these sup- 
posed realities for human life; and, see- 
ing this belief powerfully assailed, he 
addressed himself earnestly to their con- 
sideration. Earnestly, let it be said, for 
there are few poets who have realised the 
ethical obligations of their art more than 
Tennyson did. With him the end of art 



Introduction 2^ 

was not art itself. "Art for Art's sake" 
was a maxim which he openly rejected. 
Art must subserve an ethical end. It 
must be a vehicle for the good. 

" Art for Art's sake ! Hail, truest Lord of Hell ! 

Hail Genius, Master of the Moral Will ! 
* The filthiest of all paintings painted well 

Is mightier than the purest painted ill ! ' 
Yes, mightier than the purest painted well, 

So prone are we toward the broad way to Hell." 

Thus he characterised "Art for Art's 
sake " " instead of Art for Art — and — 
Man's sake."i His son says: "These 
lines in a measure expressed his strong 
and sorrowful conviction, that the English 
were beginning to forget what was, in 
Voltaire's words, the glory of English 
literature — 'No nation has treated in 
poetry moral ideas with more energy and 
depth than the English nation. '"^ He 
adds further, that his father quoted George 
Sand's words: "L'art pour art est un 
vain mot: l'art pour le vrai, l'art pour le 

1 Memoir, vol. ii., p. 92. 2 ibid. 



24- The Mind of Tennyson 

beau et le bon, voila la religion que je 
cherche. " ^ The " calling " of the poet, in 
Tennyson's view, is a responsible one, 
and he must be obedient to it. This 
seems to be the lesson of Merlin and tJie 
Gleam, which the author himself pro- 
fessed to exemplify. In short, Tennyson 
felt that the poet must not work "without 
a conscience or an aim," and his aim must 
be primarily an ethical one. It is his 
business, through his art, to help men live 
this life as it ought to be lived. Life, 
however, cannot thus be lived if we rob it 
of great hopes, beliefs, and ideals. The 
poet must proclaim and maintain these if 
it be possible. The most important of 
them refer to God, freedom, and the soul's 
destiny. These give meaning and worth 
to life. These are "the mighty hopes 
which make us men. " But the age assails 
them, denies them, giving strong reasons 
for its unfaith. The effect of this upon 
human life must be discouraging and 

1 Memoir, vol. ii., p. 92, note. 



Introduction 25 

demoralising. A Godless world — with 
"dust and ashes all that is!" What in- 
spiration then; what motive power can 
be brought to bear upon man to live his 
life — to enable him to suffer, to endure, 
to love, to battle for the True and Just ? 
If we '* live and move and have our being " 
in Matter and Law, instead of in " God 
the Father; " if, in the essential elements 
of our nature, we are merely "cunning 
casts in clay," instead of self-determining 
spiritual agents — responsible for conduct ; 
if the grave be the goal of man's endeavor, 
and there be no "life everlasting;" then 
the beliefs and ideals which condition 
human life and progress lose their inspir- 
ing and impelling force. 

This was the situation as Tennyson saw 
it in the light of the tendencies of the age. 
It stirred the great deeps of his soul, and 
aroused him to most earnest consideration 
of " the reasons for the faith " which much 
of the science and philosophy of the time 
denied, hoping, in consequence, to be 



26 The Mind of Tennyson 

able, by means of his art, to give some 
helpful message to his fellow-men. And 
this earnest consideration was an honest 
consideration, also. Tennyson was con- 
servative by nature, and more or less 
predisposed to favor the Theistic and 
Christian beliefs in which he had been 
nurtured, and the significance of which 
he so thoroughly appreciated and empha- 
sised. But, on the other hand, he could 
not rest in a blind dogmatism. He loved 
the truth, and was desirous of knowing it 
and of maintaining it. The Welsh motto, 
"The truth against the world," which he 
sent to the Tennyson Society of Philadel- 
phia,^ illustrates the character of the man. 
He would not close his eyes to the truth 
if it made against his cherished predis- 
positions or beliefs. Blind authority 
could never furnish a permanent refuge 
for him. An unreasoned or an unreason- 
able faith could not satisfy him. What 
he wrote of Hallam, was true of himself: 

1 Memoir, vol. ii., p. 91. 



Introduction 2y 

" He would not make his judgment blind, 
He faced the spectres of the mind." 

How true these words are in their appli- 
cation to him will be manifest as we 
carefully follow him in his considera- 
tion of the great questions of God, Free- 
dom, and Immortality. 



GOD 

" Thou canst not prove the Nameless." 

" For nothing worthy proving can be proven, 
Nor yet disproven : wherefore thou be wise, 
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, 
And cling to Faith." 

The Ancient Sage. 

^ I ^HE problem of knowledge is the most 
-*- conspicuous problem of Modern 
Philosophy. Not knowledge of the va- 
rious objects of the particular sciences, 
but knowledge as knowledge, — knowl- 
edge in its origin, nature, reality, and 
extent, — these are the questions which 
have pre-eminently engaged the specu- 
lative mind from Descartes to Herbert 
Spencer. In working out a solution of 
the problem, some have been led to the 
conclusion, that the mind as knowing 
mind — the mind as "Reason," or "Un- 
derstanding," or "Intellect " — is incom- 



God 2g 

petent to attain unto reality. Hence 
knowledge is not real ; or, it is knowledge 
merely of the phenomenal — of reality as 
it appears, and not of reality as it is in 
itself. But the mind, they further affirm, 
is more than "Reason," "Understanding," 
or " Intellect. " It is " Practical Reason, " 
"Intuitive Reason," "Faith," or "Believ- 
ing Soul," and as such, it is able to attain 
unto that reality from which "Pure Rea- 
son " excludes her. However wide their 
differences in detail, this is the general 
position of such writers as Kant,^ Jacobi,^ 
Hamilton,^ and Mansel.* This position, 
as it bears on the question under consid- 

1 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781 ; 2d ed., revised, 
1787. Eng. trans, by Max Miiller, 2 vols., London, 1881. 
Also, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 17S8. Eng. 
trans, by T. K. Abbot, 4th ed., London, 1889. 

2 Briefe iiber die Lehre Spinoza's, Berlin, 1785. 
2d ed., enlarged, 1789. Also, David Hume iiber den 
Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus, Breslau, 
1787. 

3 Lectures on Metaphysics, Edinburgh and London. 
1865. Lectures xxxviii-xl. 

* The Limits of Religious Thought Examined, 1858. 
Also article, " Metaphysics," Encyclopaedia Britanniqa, 
8th ed. 



JO The Mind of Tennyson 

eration, means, that God is unknowable 
to the " Reason " or " Understanding " 
of man ; but is nevertheless apprehen- 
sible through the " Practical Reason " or 
through " Faith. " Tennyson takes essen- 
tially the same position.^ That is, our 
poet regards God in his essential being 
and nature as unknowable. He is not an 
object of proof or knowledge, but rather 
an object of faith. He makes a distinc- 
tion between the knowing mind and be- 
lieving mind. The Agnostic is right 
when he says God is the unprovable — the 
unknowable. But he is wrong when he 
affirms that, therefore, the human mind is 
shut out from God — that He is an unat- 
tainable Reality to the mind of man. 
Faith transcends reason, and lays hold 
upon God. Knowledge deals with the 
phenomenal, but faith deals with the 
noumenal. There are two poems in which 
this position is especially revealed, and 

1 So do his contemporaries, Carlyle, in Sartor 
Resartus; and Browning, in La Saisiaz, Ferisktah's 
Fancies, Francis Furini, etc. 



God J I 

these poems are peculiarly personal. 
They are In Memoriam, and TJie Ancient 
Sage. In the prologue to In Memoriam, 
which was written practically after the 
rest of the poem was completed, and 
which, in a sense, seems to sum up his 
belief after many years of struggle with 
doubt, he says : there is a domain of 
knowledge and a domain of faith. These 
are not contradictory. The domain of 
faith merely lies beyond the reach of 
knowledge. Knowledge " is of things 
we see." It is capable of growth, — 

" A beam in darkness, let it grow." 

But it is always limited to "things we 
see." Of course he means by "seeing" 
here, not merely sense-perception, but 
also the " seeing " of the reason — what 
we ordinarily call proof. Knowledge is 
confined to what can be known through 
the senses, and to what can be rationally 
inferred or demonstrated. But beyond 
the limits of sense and reason there lies 



j2 The Mind of Tennyson 

the great world of reality, which can be 

entered alone by faith. This distinction 

is manifest in the very first verse of the 

prologue : — 

"Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 

Whom we, that have not seen thy face, 
By faith, and faith alone, embrace, 
Believing where we cannot prove." 

Here, in the poet's judgment, is a great 
reality — God revealed in Christ ^ — which 
is a reality to be grasped by faith alone. 
It is unprovable, so we must believe 
"where we cannot prove." Later in the 
prologue, addressing this same reality, 
God in Christ, he says : — 

" We have but faith : we cannot know ; 
For knowledge is of things we see ; 
And yet we trust it comes from thee, 
A beam in darkness : let it grow." 

As we shall see later, this distinction 
which he makes between faith and 
knowledge, and which he applies here to 
the mind's relation to God as revealed in 
Christ, is an indication of his views in 



God jj 

other portions of In Meinoriam, con- 
cerning the mind's capacity to know 
God in His metaphysical nature. 

When we turn to The Ancient Sage, 
which is one of the most philosophical of 
his poems, we find this position presented 
in quite an elaborate form. This poem 
is pronounced by Miss Weld, Tennyson's 
niece, to be even more subjective than In 
Mc7noriain}- And Tennyson h imself wrote 
concerning it: "The whole poem is very 
personal. The passages about * Faith ' 
and the * Passion of the Past ' were more 
especially my own personal feelings."^ 
The poem represents a youth " worn from 
wasteful living," in conversation with an 
ancient sage. The youth has in his hand 
"a scroll of verse." The sage asks the 
privilege of reading it. It contains 
agnostic and materialistic views of God, 
life, and immortality. With reference to 
God it says : — 

1 Contemporary Review, 1893. 
'^ Memoir, vol. ii., p. 319. 



j^ The Mind of Tennyson 

" How far thro' all the bloom and brake 

That nightingale is heard ! 
What power but the bird's could make 

This music in the bird ? 
How summer-bright are yonder skies, 

And earth as fair in hue ! 
And yet what sign of aught that lies 

Behind the green and blue ? 
But man to-day is fancy's fool 

As man hath ever been. 
The nameless Power, or Powers, that rule 

Were never heard or seen." 

Here we have a thorough-going Agnosti- 
cism, and, indeed, one of its lowest forms, 
which limits all knowledge to what the 
senses reveal. It hears the " music in the 
bird," but can recognise no other Power as 
the author of it than the power of the bird 
itself. It sees the summer-brightness of 
the skies, and the fair hue of the earth, but 
to it the heavens declare not the glory 
of God, nor does the firmament show His 
handiwork. Its language is merely — 

" How summer-bright are yonder skies, 
And earth as fair in hue I 
And yet what sign of aught that lies 
Behind the green and blue ? " 



God j5 

Man is, and ever has been, "fancy's fool " 
with reference to that which lies beyond 
the domain of sense; and, so far as sense 
is concerned, — 

" The nameless Power, or Powers, that rule 
Were never heard or seen." 

Now Tennyson, through the reply of the 
sage, rebukes this kind of Agnosticism. 
He calls attention to man's inner being, 
with its power of discernment, as distin- 
guished from the outer being of sense, 
and says : — 

" If thou would 'sthear the Nameless, and wilt dive 
Into the Temple-cave of thine own self, 
There, brooding by the central altar, thou 
May 'st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice, 
By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise. 
As if thou knewest, tho' thou canst not know ; 
For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake 
That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there 
But never yet hath dipt into the abysm, 
The Abysm of all Abysms, beneath, within 
The blue of sky and sea, the green of earth, 
And in the milhon-millionth of a grain 
Which cleft and cleft again for evermore, 
And ever vanishing, never vanishes, 



j(5 The Mind of Tennyson 

To me, my son, more mystic than myself, 
Or even than the Nameless is to me. 

And when thou sendest thy free soul thro 
heaven. 
Nor understandest bound nor boundlessness. 
Thou seest the Nameless of the hundred names. 

And if the Nameless should withdraw from all 
Thy frailty counts most real, all thy world 
Might vanish like thy shadow in the dark." 

- Here we sec that it is not by sense, but 
by diving " into the Temple-cave " of one's 
own being, that the Nameless, or God, is 
to be apprehended. There we learn that 
the Nameless has a voice. Nor, looking 
at the outer world, is it by knowledge 
that God is to be found, — 

" For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake " 

merely skimming along the surface ; never 
dipping into the abysm. Dip into the 
abysm, and, in your failure to understand 
its bounds or boundlessness, it is then 
that your soul sees God. 

But the sage continues to read the 
"scroll of verse," which persists in un- 
folding its agnostic positions. 



God s7 

"And since — from when this earth began — 
The Nameless never came 
Among us, never spake with man, 
And never named the Name " — 

Here the sage stops to make a reply, 
in which he calls attention to the limits, 
of the demonstrating or proving mind, and 
to the province of faith. 

"Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son, 
Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in, 
Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone, 
Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone, 
Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one : 
Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no 
Nor yet that thou art mortal — nay my son. 
Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with 

thee. 
Am not thyself in converse with thyself, 
For nothing worthy proving can be proven, 
Nor yet disproven." 

Here the limits of rational proof are 
pointed out : there are a great many 
things, some of which we regard as most 
real and true, which neither admit of proof 
nor disproof. They do not lie within the 
domain of knowledge, — of that which is 



j8 The Mind of Tennyson 

capable of rational proof or demonstration, 
— nor, indeed, within the domain of dis- 
proof. They belong not to the field of 
sense or reason. God is one of these 
realities. What then.? Complete Agnos- 
ticism.? No! Man is more than sense 
and reason. He is believing soul. He 
has the power of faith. "Wherefore," 
says the sage, — 

" thou be wise," 
since — 

" nothing worthy proving can be proven, 
Nor yet disproven : 

Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, 
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith ! 
She reels not in the storm of warring words, 
She brightens at the clash of ' Yes ' and ' No,' 
She sees the Best that glimmers thro' the Worst, 
She feels the Sun is hid but for a night, 
She spies the summer thro' the winter bud, 
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls, 
She hears the lark within the songless tgg, 
She finds the fountain where they wail'd 
' Mirage ' ! " 

The lesson is taught here that there is 
a power of mind which sees what sense 



God jp 

and reason cannot see. And, so far as 
it concerns the question under considera- 
tion, we are told that — 

"Thou canst not prove the Nameless," 

but we are not, therefore, to doubt his 
reality, but rather to "cling to Faith." 
She penetrates through the veil of sense 
and reason; she sees the reality from 
which they are shut out. 

But, turning again to the "scroll of 
verse," it continues with reference to 
God: — 

" What Power ? aught akin to Mind, 
The mind in me and you ? 
Or power as of the Gods gone blind 
Who see not what they do ? " 

That is, it is asked whether this Power 
behind the veil of sense is a mind like 
ourselves, or, noting the imperfection of 
the world, whether it is merely a blind, 
unconscious, or, it may be, irrational, 
blundering power. 

The sage replies, that there are some 



4-0 The Mind of Tennyson 

who, despite the defects, can only account 
for *'this house of ours" by attributing 
its workmanship to the Gods. But in 
this answer the poet again tells us that 
God is not known, but only felt. 

" But some in yonder city hold, my son, 
That none but Gods could build this house of 

ours, 
So beautiful, vast, various, so beyond 
All work of man, yet, like all work of man, 

A beauty with defect till That which knows. 

And is not known, but felt thro' what we feel 
Within ourselves is highest, shall descend 
On this half-deed, and shape it at the last 
According to the Highest in the Highest." 

But the Agnosticism in the scroll con- 
tinues. It affirms Time to be the only 
Power and Ruler in the world. 

" What Power but the Years that make 

And break the vase of clay, 
And stir the sleeping earth, and wake 

The bloom that fades away ? 
What rulers but the Days and Hours 

That cancel weal with woe, 
And wind the front of youth with flowers, 

And cap our age with snow ? " 



God ^7 

But the sage again calls attention to 
the limits or superficiality of knowledge. 
Time is merely a conditioning form of 
knowledge. It is relative — subjective. 
It does not apply to reality. The mind, 
hampered by this form of Time, can, 
therefore, only know a phenomenal world. 
The unfortunate results of our mental im- 
potency — of knowledge as conditioned by 
the Time-form — are seen in our views 
of Deity, to whom the Time-category is 
not applicable. 

" The days and hours are ever glancing by, 
And seem to flicker past thro' sun and shade, 
Or short, or long, as Pleasure leads, or Pain ; 
But with the Nameless is nor Day nor 

Hour; 
Tho' we, thin minds, who creep from thought to 

thought, 
Break into 'Thens' and 'Whens' the Eternal 

Now : 
This double seeming of the single world ! — 
My words are like the babblings in a dream 
Of nightmare, when the babblings break the 

dream. 
But thou be wise in this dream-world of ours, 



^2 The Mind of Tennyson 

Nor take thy dial for thy deity, 

But make the passing shadow serve thy will." ^ 

We see thus that in these two great 
poems, In Memoriam, and The Ancient 

1 This subjectivity and relativity of Time, with its 
inapplicability to the Deity, is a positive position with 
Tennyson. Several times, before writing The Ancient 
Sage, he calls our attention to it in his poetry. In The 
Princess, he says : — 

" To your question now, 
Which touches on the workman and his work. 
Let there be light and there was light : 't is so : 
For was, and is, and will be, are but is ; 
And all creation is one act at once, 
The birth of light : but we that are not all, 
As parts, can see but parts, now this, now that. 
And live, perforce, from thought to thought, and make 
One act a phantom of succession : thus 
Our weakness somehow shapes the shadow. Time." 

The poet takes the same position in regard to the 
subjective or relative nature of Time in De Profundis; 
denying its applicability to God. The spirit of the newly 
born child is spoken of as follows : — 

" O dear Spirit half-lost 
In thine own shadow and this fleshly sign 
That thou art thou — who wailest being born 
And banish'd into mystery, and the pain 
Of this divisible-indivisible world 
Among the numerable-innumerable 
Sun, sun, and sun, thro' finite-infinite space 
In finite-infinite Time — our mortal veil 
And shatter'd phantom of that infinite One," etc. 



God 4.J 

Sage, Tennyson draws a distinction be- 
tween knowledge, which deals with the 
phenomenal, and faith, which deals with 
the noumenal. He affirms God, and,l/as 
we shall see later, immortality, to be the 
real world — not to be apprehended by 
the knowing mind, but by the believing 
soul. They belong, not to the province 
of the knowable, but to the province of 
the believable. 

Now, this position was not dogmatically 
or uncritically assumed by Tennyson. 
He thought earnestly on this subject. It 
is safe to say that he was familiar with 
the so-called "proofs" of the being and 
nature of God as they appear in Modern 
Philosophy. For, of the writers with 
whose works we have found him ac- 
quainted, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and 
Kant have respectively discussed one or 
more of them. Of these "proofs" or 
arguments, the teleological or design 
argument has always seemed the most 
convincing. It points to the apparent 



^/f The Mind of Tennyson 

order and harmony, symmetry and propor- 
tion, adaptation of means to ends, in the 
world, as evidences of design or purpose, 
and infers from these the intelligence and 
rationality of the World-Ground, or God. 
Because of the prevalence of the mechani- 
cal conception of nature in Tennyson's 
time, the design argument figured con- 
spicuously in the scientific, philosophical, 
and theological controversies of the age. 
As a "proof" of the existence of an intel- 
ligent Deity the argument had little force 
with Tennyson. This is evident from 
the following: — 

" That which we dare invoke to bless ; 

Our dearest faith ; our ghastliest doubt ; 
He, They, One, All ; within, without; 
The Power in darkness whom we guess ; 

' " I found Him not in world or sun, 
Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye." 

Here the poet confesses that he cannot 
find God as Personal Intelligence in 
Nature. The order and harmony of the 
** worlds " and " suns " have usually been 



God ^J 

regarded by teleologists as constituting 
strong evidence in favor of their position. 
But Tennyson says, — 

" I found Him not in world or sun." 

The wing of the bird has also been used 
as a striking example of "final cause." 
Huxley said that the difference between 
the teleologist and mechanist is seen in 
this : the former says that the bird has 
wings in order that it may fly; whereas 
the latter says that the bird flies because 
it has wings. But Tennyson says, he 
finds Him not in "eagle's wing." Fur- 
thermore, the eye has, with most theistic 
writers, been regarded as a classic exam- j 
pie of design or purpose in nature. It 
seems to reveal a remarkable adaptation 
of means to end — of organ to function. 
But despite this, Tennyson finds Him not 
in "insect's eye." 

Indeed, Tennyson does not find Nature 
revealing design or purpose. His poetry 
feveals th§ Jact that he appealed to 



/{jS The Mind of Tennyson 

Nature more than once on this subject, 
and always with the same result. In the 
fifty-fourth and fifty-fifth poems of In 
Memoriam, where the question of a pur- 
pose in Nature is under consideration, he 
confesses inadequacy of knowledge with 
reference to a purpose of God in Nature, 
and the necessity of faith in order to get 
at Nature's "secret meaning." In con- 
sidering the final goal of ill (in the 
form of pain and sin), and the tremendous 
"profusion and waste" in Nature, he 
says : — 

" Oh, yet we trust [not know] that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill, 
To pangs of nature, sins of will, 
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood ; 

" That nothing walks with aimless feet ; 
That not one life shall be destroy'd, 
Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
When God hath made the pile complete ; 

" That not a worm is cloven in vain ; 
That not a moth with vain desirq 
Is shrivell'd in a fruitless fire, 
Or but subserves another's gain,'' 



God /j.y 

But in regard to all this we have no knowl- 
edge, but only trust. For he adds : — 

;> " Behold, we know not anything ; 

I can but trust that good shall fall 
At last — far off — at last, to all, 
And every winter change to spring." 

And then follow those most pathetic 
words : — 

■ "So runs my dream : but what am I ? 
An infant crying in the night : 
An infant crying for the light : 
And with no language but a cry." 

And, again, in the fifty-fifth poem, 
where he is considering the question of 
immortality from the standpoint of God's 
purpose in Nature. He does not find 
Nature revealing a purpose of God ; or, if 
anything, revealing hostility to His pur- 
pose as manifest in the soul of man. 

" The wish, that of the living whole 
No life may fail beyond the grave, 
Derives it not from what we have 
The nicest God within the soul ? 



/f.8 The Mind of Tennyson 

'* Are God and Nature then at strife, 

That Nature lends such evil dreams ? 
So careful of the type she seems, 
So careless of the single life ; 

"That I, considering everywhere 
Her secret meaning in her deeds, 
And finding that of fifty seeds 
She often brings but one to bear, 

" I falter where I firmly trod, 

And falling with my weight of cares 
Upon the great world's altar-stairs 
That slope through darkness up to God, 

" I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope. 
And gather dust and chaff, and call 
To what I feel is Lord of all. 
And faintly trust the larger hope." 

But he seems also to be suspicious of 
the other theistic arguments, if we rightly 
interpret him. These "prove" the exist- 
ence of a Perfect Being from the neces- 
sary idea of such a being which we possess ; 
and, secondly, the existence of an eternal 
First Cause from the existence of a finite, 
changing, dependent world. In regard to 
these arguments Tennyson says : — 



God ^g 

" I found Him not in world or sun, 
Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye ; 
Nor thro' the questions men may try, 
The petty cobwebs we have spuny 

It seems quite probable that Tennyson 
here, in the words "the questions men 
may try," refers to the other philosophical 
arguments for the existence of God. They 
occur in immediate connection with the 
words in which he rejects the design argu- 
ment. They fail to reveal God to him. 
As " proofs " they carry no force of convic- 
tion. So utterly do they fall short of 
their purpose that the poet speaks of them 
almost contemptuously. He pronounces 
them to be nothing more than — 

" The petty cobwebs we have spun." 

This rejection of the traditional 
"proofs" of the being and nature of God 
is in harmony with his general position 
already stated. It means — 

" Thou canst not prove the Nameless." 

It means, God is — 
4 



^o The Mind of Tennyson 

" That which knows, 
And is not known." 

It means, concerning God, — 

" We have but faith : we cannot know." 

It means, God is, so far as sense and 
reason are concerned, — 

" The Power in darkness whom we guess." 

But, on the other hand, these very 
poems which reveal the impotency of the 
mind so far as its capacity to know God 
is concerned, also point out the necessity 
of falling back upon another power of 
man — faith. If an "intelligible First 
Cause" be not "deducible from physical 
phenomena," as Tennyson affirmed, in his 
vote on this question when under consid- 
eration in the society of "Apostles," in 
Cambridge;^ if He be not revealed "in 
world or sun," or "eagle's wing," or "in- 
sect's eye;" if He be not disclosed to us 
" in the questions men may try," He is re- 
vealed to man through faith. The In- 
1 Memoir, vol. i., p. 44, note. 



God J-/ 

visible to the eye of sense becomes 
visible to the eye of faith. The unprov- 
able and unknowable to the demonstrat- 
ing reason becomes the apprehensible to 
the believing soul. Wherefore, we are 
enjoined to — • 
• " Cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith." 

We can believe "where we cannot prove." 
And what kind of God does faith 
reveal .? According to Tennyson, faith 
reveals a personal God. This is evident 
when we glance at the following poems. ^ 
Take, for example, his little poem entitled 
The Human Cry : — 
I. 
" Hallowed be Thy name — Halleluiah ! 
Infinite Ideality ! 
Immeasurable Reality! 
Infinite Personality ! 
Hallowed be Thy name — Halleluiah !" 

^ The distinction between Christian faith and philo- 
sophical faith is not very marked in Tennyson. In 
some of these poems he undoubtedly refers to Chris- 
tian faith. In /w Memoriam, he refers now to one, then 
to the other. In The Ancie?it Sage, he apparently re- 
fers to philosophical faith. However, with him, their 
essential content is the same. 



5-? The Mind of Tennyson 

II. 

" We feel we are nothing, — for all is Thou and in 

Thee ; 
We feel we are something, — that also has come 

from Thee ; 
We know we are nothing, — but Thou wilt help 

us to be. 
Hallowed be Thy name — Halleluiah ! " 

Again, the entire prologue to In Memo- 
riam declares God as personal being to be 
revealed to us by faith. Indeed, it recog- 
nises God as revealed in the person of 
Christ: — 

" Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 

Whom we, that have not seen thy face, 
By faith, and faith alone, embrace, 
Believing where we cannot prove; 

" Thine are these orbs of light and shade ; 
Thou madest Life in man and brute ; 
Thou madest Death ; and lo, thy foot 
Is on the skull which thou hast made. 

" Thou wilt not leave us in the dust : 

Thou madest man, he knows not why. 
He thinks he was not made to die ; 
And thou hast made him : thou art just. 



God ^j 

" Thou seemest human and divine, 

The highest, holiest manhood, thou : 

Our wills are ours, we know not how ; 

Our wills are ours, to make them thine. 

" Our little systems have their day ; 

They have their day and cease to be: 
They are but broken lights of thee. 
And thou, O Lord, art more than they. 

" We have but faith : we cannot know ; 
For knowledge is of things we see ; 
And yet we trust it comes from thee, 
A beam in darkness : let it grow. 

" Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
But more of reverence in us dwell ; 
That mind and soul, according well, 
May make one music as before, 

" But vaster. We are fools and slight ; 
We mock thee when we do not fear : 
But help thy foolish ones to bear ; 
Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light. 

" Forgive what seem'd my sin in me ; 

What seem'd my worth since I began ; 
For merit lives from man to man. 
And not from man, O Lord, to thee. 

" Forgive my grief for one removed. 
Thy creature, whom I found so fair. 
I trust he lives in thee, and there 
I find him worthier to be loved. 



5^ The Mind of Tennyson 

" Forgive these wild and wandering cries, 
Confusions of a wasted youth ; 
Forgive them where they fail in truth, 
And in thy wisdom make me wise." 

This is a prayer. The very prayer itself 
involves the recognition of a personal 
God revealed in Christ. Every verse of 
the prayer, except one, distinctly specifies 
as personal the nature of the Being ad- 
dressed. And the opening verse tells us 
He is embraced alone by faith. And so 
in the poems entitled Doubt and Prayer, 
Faithy and God and the Universe, faith 
apprehends God as personal being. So 
far, then, as the being and nature of God 
are concerned, according to Tennyson, 
they are not matters of proof or knowl- 
edge, but of faith. 

Now, when we try to&irthe^-determin^ 
the nature of God as Love, we find our 
poet holding the same position. God's 
nature as Love is not a matter of knowl- 
edge, but of faith. He struggled with 
this question also in the light of what 



God SS 

science and philosophy had to say. He 
was greatly interested in the theory of 
organic evolution, and in the Darwinian 
explanation of it. This "struggle for 
existence," with its dreadful suffering, is 
an awful fact. Nature, in her onward 
course, has left a trail of blood reaching 
far back into the ages. Tennyson was 
profoundly impressed by this fact. He 
made his appeal to Nature to find out 
whether the great Author of Nature is 
essential Love. Such an appeal seemed 
to indicate that He is not. There is a 
very significant statement by him on this 
point recorded in the Memoir. He said, 
with reference to the pain and imperfec- 
tion of the world, which at times almost 
impelled him to doubt the intelligence 
and love of God : " Yet God is love, tran- 
scendent, all-pervading! We do not get 
this faith from Nature or the world. If 
we look at Nature alone, full of perfec- 
tion and imperfection, she tells us that 
God is disease, murder, and rapine. We 



^6 The Mind of Tennyson 

get this faith from ourselves, from what 
is highest within us, which recognises 
that there is not one fruitless pang, just 
as there is not one lost good. "^ This 
faith is the trust he attributes to man in 
the words quoted above, and which he 
speaks of in the fifty-fourth poem of /;/ 
Memoriam : — 

" Oh yet we trust that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill. 
To pangs of nature," etc. 

This appeal to Nature was, of course, 
from the standpoint of sense and reason. 
In Tennyson's case it was often made 
through science, for, as previously stated, 
he was a careful student of science. But 
his appeal results in no proof of God's 
love. This attribute of God's nature 
must also be apprehended by faith. Faith 
alone can discern God as Love in the 
midst of the physical suffering of the 
world. So we are enjoined, in his little 
poem entitled Faith, to — 

1 Memoir, vol. i., p. 314. 



God 5; 

" Doubt no longer that the Highest is the wisest 
and the best, 
Let not all that saddens Nature blight thy hope 
or break thy rest, 
Quail not at the fiery mountain, at the ship- 
wreck, or the rolling 
Thunder, or the rending earthquake, or the 
famine, or the pest ! " 

But he not only considered this problem 
of the love of God from the standpoint of 
suffering, as manifest in the physical 
world, but also from the standpoint of its 
broader aspects, as treated by philosophy. 
He took into consideration the mental 
suffering of the world, — the suffering 
caused by sin; yea, the sin itself. Not 
only the "pangs of nature" and "taints 
of blood," but also the "defects of 
doubt," "the sins of will," etc., were 
considered in their bearing upon the 
nature and character of God as Love. 
And here he came to the same conclusion : 
that, so far as knowledge is concerned, 
we cannot find God as Love in the mental 
and moral evil of the world. We can 



^8 The Mind of Tennyson 

only find him as such through hope, trust, 
and faith. In Memoriam, taken as a 
whole, evidences this position. As Ten- 
nyson himself said concerning this great 
poem : "The different moods of sorrow as 
in a drama are dramatically given, and 
my conviction that fear, doubts, and suffer- 
ing will find answer and relief only 
through Faith in a God of Love." ^ 

This, too, is hinted in The Ancient Sage. 
The "scroll of verse," to which reference 
has been made, continues to point to evi- 
dence that Time is the great Power and 
Ruler of the world, and presents a melan- 
choly description of His fearful ravages. 
To this the sage replies : — 

" My son, the world is dark with grief and graves, 
So dark that men cry out against the heavens." 

But from what follows, it seems the sage 
means to intimate that this is merely 
the world as it appears to sense and rea- 
son. Faith, however, presents a different 
picture: — 

* Memoir, vol. i., pp. 304, 305. 



God 5p 

" Who knows but that the darkness is in man ? 
The doors of Night may be the gates of Light ; 
For wert thou born or blind or deaf, and then 
Suddenly heal'd, how would'st thou glory in all 
The splendours and the voices of the world ! 
And we, the poor earth's dying race, and yet 
No phantoms, watching from a phantom shore, 
Await the last and largest sense to make 
The phantom walls of this illusion fade. 
And show us that the world is wholly fair." 

And again, in one of his later poems, 
entitled Doubt and Prayer, the fact is 
pointed out, that through sin we are led 
to misinterpret the sorrowful experiences 
of life, which are God's providences, 
attributing them to "Blind Fate." And 
the poet prays that he may learn the les- 
son of faith on this point, which is, that 
Love, not "Blind Fate," rules the world. 

" Tho' Sin, too oft, when smitten by Thy rod, 
Rail at ' Blind Fate ' with many a vain ' Alas ! ' 
From sin thro' sorrow into Thee we pass 
By that same path our true forefathers trod ; 
And let not Reason fail me, nor the sod 
Draw from my death Thy living flower and grass. 
Before I learn that Love, which is, and was 
My Father, and my Brother, and my God ! 



6o The Mind of Tennyson 

Steel me with patience ! soften me with grief ! 
Let blow the trumpet strongly while I pray, 
Till this embattled wall of unbelief 
My prison, not my fortress, fall away ! 
Then, if thou wiliest, let my day be brief, 
So Thou wilt strike Thy glory thro' the day." 

The Love of God, then, according to 
Tennyson's view, is rather a fact of faith 
than an object of knowledge. And this 
interpretation of his poetry is corroborated 
by external evidence. In a letter to Miss 
Emily Sellwood, afterward Lady Tenny- 
son, he says : " ' Why has God created souls 
knowing they would sin and suffer?' a 
question unanswerable. Man is greater 
than all animals because he is capable of 
moral good and evil, tho' perhaps dogs 
and elephants, and some of the higher 
mammalia have a little of this capability. 
God might have made me a beast ; but He 
thought good to give me power, to set 
Good and Evil before me, that I might 
shape my own path. The happiness, 
resulting from this power well exercised, 
must in the end exceed the mere physical 



God 6i 

happiness of breathing, eating, and sleep- 
ing like an ox. Can we say that God pre- 
fers higher happiness in some to a lower 
happiness in all ? It is a hard thing that 
if I sin and fail I should be sacrificed to 
the bliss of the Saints. Yet what reason- 
able creature, if he could have been askt 
beforehand, would not have said, ' Give 
me the metaphysical power; let me be the 
lord of my decisions; leave physical 
quietude and dull pleasure to lower lives ' .-• 
All souls, methinks, would have answered 
thus, and so had men suffered by their 
own choice, as now by the necessity of 
being born what they are, but there is no 
answer to these questions except in a great 
hope of universal good : and even then one 
might ask, why has God made one to 
suffer more than another, why is it not 
meted equally to all.? Let us be silent, 
for we know nothing of these things, and 
we trust there is One who knows all. 
God cannot be cruel. If He were, the 
heart could only find relief in the wildest 



62 The Mind of Tennyson 

blasphemies, which would cease to be 
blasphemies. God must be all powerful, 
else the soul could never deem Him 
worthy of her highest worship. Let us 
leave it therefore to God, as to the wisest. 
Who knows whether revelation be not 
itself a veil to hide the glory of that 
Love which we could not look upon 
without marring our sight, and our onward 
progress ? " ^ 

On the question, then, of the nature of 
God as Love, we find Tennyson's teaching 
to be, that it is not a matter of knowledge, 
but of faith ; and, however strong be the 
evidence from Nature and human experi- 
ence to the contrary, through faith we 
may apprehend God as Love; through 
faith we may be enabled — 

" To feel, altho' no tongue can prove, 
That every cloud, that spreads above 
And veileth love, itself is love." 

Thus we have seen that Tennyson was 
in sympathy with much of our modern 
1 Memoir, vol. L, pp. 170. 



God 6j 

science and philosophy in their Agnosti- 
cism. God is, indeed, "the Unknown and 
the Unknowable." But it is important 
to note, that he did not rest in Agnos- 
ticism. He regarded it as merely half 
the truth respecting God, and man's 
capacity to reach Him. There is another 
side to man's being. This, too, has its 
legitimate domain — its field of realities. 
This is faith. And, as he said to Locker- 
Lampson, "Whatever is the object of 
Faith cannot be the object of Reason. In 
fine, Faith must be our guide." ^ If, as 
perceiving mind and demonstrating rea- 
son, man is limited to the phenomenal; as 
believing soul, he can transcend these 
narrow bounds and pass from the " shadow " 
to the substance ; from the appearance to 
the reality — to the Supreme Reality 
"which Faith calls God, and Philosophy 
calls the Absolute." Faith tells us that 
God is; that He is Personal Intelligence, 
and that He is Eternal Love. Thus 

1 Memoir, vol. ii., pp. 68, 69. 



64- The Mind of Tennyson 

did our poet meet the Agnosticism of his 

age. 

But Tennyson really reached a more 
speculative conclusion on this subject than 
is indicated above. He dealt not merely 
with the Agnostic, but also with the 
Materialist; and, in his ontological specu- 
lations, he came to conclusions with refer- 
ence to the being and nature of God in 
perfect harmony with those of his Faith 
Philosophy. Let us take, for example, 
that speculative poem entitled The Higher 
Pantheism. This poem was sent by Ten- 
nyson to the Metaphysical Society, pre- 
viously referred to, as undoubtedly ex- 
pressive of his own personal views. It 
deals with the problems of ontology, — 
the ultimate nature of reality, and the 
relation of the finite to the Infinite, With 
reference to these problems we find him 
to be an Idealist. He declares all reality, 
in the final analysis, to be mentality. 
That is, there is only one kind of being, 
and that is Mind. He cancels the reality 



God 6$ 

of the so-called corporeal or material 
world, — allowing it merely a phenomenal 
existence. An examination of the poem 
makes this evident at once : — 

" The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills 
and the plains — 
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who 
reigns ? 

" Is not the Vision He ? tho' He be not that which 
He seems ? 
Dreams are true while they last, and do we not 
live in dreams? 

" Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and 
limb, 
Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from 
Him? 

" Dark is the world to thee : thyself art the reason 
why; 
For is He not all but that which has power to feel 
* I am I ' ? 

" Glory about thee, without thee ; and thou f ulfillest 
thy doom. 
Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled splen- 
dour and gloom. 

" Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with 
Spirit can meet — 
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than 
hands and feet. 

S 



66 The Mind of Tennyson 

" God is law, say the wise ; O Soul, and let us 
rejoice, 
For if He thunder by law the thunder is yet His 
voice. 

" Law is God, say some ; no God at all, says the 
fool; 
For all we have power to see is a straight staff 
bent in a pool ; 

" And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of 

man cannot see ; 
" But if we could see and hear, this Vision — were 

it not He ? " 

The most thorough-going Idealism is 
revealed in this poem. The reality of 
corporeal or material objects is annihi- 
lated, and minds only are affirmed to exist, 
— the Infinite Mind and finite minds. 

" For is He not all but that which has power to 
feel ' I am r ? " 

That is, God, who is personal (he uses 
the personal pronoun), is all but self- 
conscious finite being, — that finite being 
which has the power to feel "I am I." 
Corporeal beings have no such power of 
self-consciousness, hence they have no 



God 6y 

reality. Only self-conscious being really 
is. All else is merely phenomenal. 
This is, of course, Idealism. 

But the form of Idealism, whether sub- 
jective or objective, revealed in this poem, 
is not so easily determined. Subjective 
Idealism declares corporeal things to have 
no other reality than as "ideas" in the 
mind. As Berkeley affirmed, their being 
consists in their being perceived. " Their 
esse \s percipi.'" ^ Cancel mind, and there 
is no matter. Objective Idealism, on the 
other hand, affirms, that so-called corporeal 
objects have something more than mere 
subjective existence — existence merely 
as " ideas " in the perceiving mind. They 
have an objective or extra-ynental existence ; 
but not in the form of independent, mate- 
rial things, as assumed and conceived of 
by uncritical thought; but rather as defi- 
nite modes or forms of activity or energis- 
ing of the Infinite Mind. Of these two 

1 Of the Principles of Human Knowledge, pt. i. 
sec. 3. 



68 The Mind of Tennyson 

kinds of Idealism, Tennyson leans toward 
the latter. In the first couplet of the 
above poem, such supposed substantial 
realities as the sun, the moon, the stars, 
the seas, etc., are represented to us as 
having only the being of a "vision" — 
they are the soul's "vision" of God. 
Now the word vision can either refer to 
the mental act of perception, or to the 
object perceived. In both instances we 
might have subjective Idealism, because 
the object perceived might be merely a 
mental one. But the second couplet of 
the poem helps us in our interpretation. 
Here he evidently uses the word " vision " 
in the sense of the object perceived, and 
indicates it to be an extra-mental object. 
He identifies the "vision" with God 
himself. 

" Is not the Vision He ? tho' He be not that 
which He seems? " 

And again, in the fourth couplet, he 
says : — 



God 6g 

" Dark is the world to thee : thyself art the reason 
why; 
For is He not all but that which has the power 
to feel ' I am I ' ? " 

And again, in the last couplet : — 

" And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of 
man cannot see; 
But if we could see and hear, this Vision — were 
it not He ? " 

But, furthermore, we have not only- 
Idealism, and probably objective Idealism, 
here; but also Theistic Idealism. And 
this is important, as bearing on the ques- 
tion under consideration, namely, Tenny- 
son's view of the nature of God. There 
is an Idealism which is Pantheism. It 
holds the position, that all being is one 
and psychic in its nature, — but not per- 
sonal. It cancels both the personality of 
God and of man — making man merely a 
mode or manifestation of the Infinite. 
But not so with Tennyson. His " Higher 
Pantheism " is not Pantheism. It is 
Idealistic Theism. He distinctly affirms 



yo The Mind of Tennyson 

all being to be personal spirit. And there 
are two kinds of personal spirit : God, 
the infinite Spirit, and all finite beings 
which have the power of self-conscious- 
ness ; " the power to feel 'I am I. ' " Every 
couplet of this poem, save one, uses the 
personal pronoun in speaking of God. 
And the third and fourth couplets espe- 
cially declare the distinct individuality 
and personality of the finite spirit. 

We have, then, in this speculative poem, 
both a declaration against Materialism 
and against Pantheism. Matter has no 
reality. If it exist at all, it has only 
phenomenal existence. Mind, or self- 
conscious being, is the only true reality. 
And there are two kinds of minds or per- 
sonal spirits, — the Infinite and the finite ; 
and their intimate relation is declared in 
those beautiful words : — 

" Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit 
with Spirit can meet — 
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than 
hands and feet." 



God yi 

Now, if we turn to other poems, we find 
this idealistic view of the ultimate nature 
of reality at least indirectly confirmed by 
his repeated affirmation that the so-called 
material world has merely a phenomenal 
existence. He pronounces it a "phan- 
tom " and a " shadow. " In De Profnndis, 
the true world is not the one we see. We 
see merely a "shadow-world." The child 
is represented as coming — 

" out of the deep, 
From that true world within the world we see, 
Whereof our world is but the bounding shore — " 

Man is represented here as having — 

" drawn to this shore lit by the suns and moons 
And all the shadows." 

In The Ancient Sage, there are several 
references to this "phantom-shore," or 
" shadow-world. " He preserves our reality 
as spirits, but affirms the phantom nature 
of the world. He says : — 

" And we, the poor earth's dying race, and yet 
No phantoms, watching from a phantom shore." 



^2 The Mind of Tennyson 

Again, in describing a trance experience, 
to which he was subject, he speaks of the 
nature of this experience as one of "utter 
clearness." 

" and thro' loss of Self 
The gain of such large life as match'd with ours 
Were Sun to spark — unshadowable in words, 
Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world." 

Again, in the poem entitled God and 
the Universe, he refers to " the myriad 
world" as God's "shadow": — 

" Spirit, nearing yon dark portal at the limit of thy 

human state, 
Fear not thou the hidden purpose of that Power 

which alone is great, 
Nor the myriad world, His shadow, nor the 

Silent Opener of the Gate." 

In all of these references, reality is denied 
to the corporeal world. It is merely a 
"phantom" — a "shadow" of God, the 
Spiritual. 

This idealistic conception of reality is 
also brought out in a number of conversa- 
tions of Tennyson which have been re- 



God 7j 

corded. Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson 
informs us that, in a conversation he once 
had with Tennyson, while gazing upon 
the Alps, he said, " Perhaps this earth, 
and all that is on it — storms, mountains, 
cataracts, the sun and the skies — are the 
Almighty: in fact, that such is our petty 
nature, we cannot see Him, but we see 
His shadow, as it were, a distorted 
shadow. "1 Again, Mrs. Bradley has a 
record in her diary of words uttered by 
Tennyson in her presence, in January, 
1869, as follows: "Yes, it is true that 
there are moments when the flesh is 
nothing to me, when I feel and know the 
flesh to be the vision, God and the Spirit- 
ual the only real and true. Depend upon 
it, the Spiritual ts the real : it belongs to 
one more than the hand and foot. You 
may tell me that my hand and my foot 
are only imaginary symbols of my exist- 
ence, I could believe you ; but you never, 
never can convince me that the / is not an 

1 Memoir, vol. ii., p. 68. 



y^- The Mind of Tennyson 

eternal Reality, and that the Spiritual is 
not the true and real part of me."^ His 
son informs us, that in one of his " last 
talks " he said, " Spirit seems to me to 
be the reality of the world. "^ Again, 
talking with Frederick Locker-Lampson 
" of the materialists, " he said : " After all, 
what is matter?" "I think it is merely 
the shadow of something greater than 
itself, and which we poor, shortsighted 
creatures cannot see."^ 

The only reality, then, in Tennyson's 
conception, is mind, — the Infinite and the 
finite. God is, and He is personal. Man 
is, and he is personal. God and Man 
as personal being constitute the only 
reality, and between them exists a close 
relationship: — 

"Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit 
with Spirit can meet — 
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than 
hands and feet." 

1 Memoir, vol. ii. p. 90. ^ ibid., p. 424. 

3 Ibid., p. 69. 



God 75 

Thus we see, that Tennyson, in his more 
speculative thinking, came to essentially 
the same conclusions, with reference to 
the being and nature of God, as those 
attained in his Philosophy of Faith. 



FREEDOM 

Our wills are ours, we know not how; 
Our wills are ours, to make them thine. 

In Memoriam, Prologue, 4. 

. . . who wrought 
Not Matter, nor the finite-infinite, 
But this main-miracle, that thou art thou, 
With power on thine own act and on the world. 

De Profundis, II., ii. 

/'~\NE of the fundamental problems 
^-^ which has had, in nearly every 
age, a fascination for the speculative 
mind, is the problem of freedom, or 
free-will. From the time of Socrates 
down to the present, it has seriously en- 
gaged the philosophic world.^ Its promi- 
nence in the scientific, philosophical, and 
theological thinking of Tennyson's age did 
not fail to arrest his attention, and, in 

1 See A. Alexander, Theories of the Will in the 
History of Philosophy, New York, 1S98. 



Freedom yy 

consequence, the question of freedom has 
received earnest consideration at his hands. 
However, his interest in this question, Hke 
his interest in the problems of God and 
immortahty, was not merely speculative, 
but practical. He clearly saw, that this 
profound problem, however fascinating 
and engaging to the reflective mind, was 
not simply a problem of the philosopher's 
den, but one having a vital bearing on 
human life. And, indeed, he approached 
it from this point of view. We cannot 
give up " the mighty hopes that make us 
men," neither can we yield those funda- 
mental beliefs which give life its supreme 
worth. The freedom of the will, in our 
poet's opinion, was one of these beliefs. 
On it rest the moral interests of life. But 
this is one of those great behefs which the 
science and philosophy of the age threat- 
ened. The materialistic conception of 
man, which was so widely prevalent, was 
of course inconsistent with a belief in free 
agency. The sensationalistic psychology 



7«? The Mind of Tennyson 

and philosophy, which regarded man as 
merely " a bundle of sensations," grouped 
according to mechanical laws, was also in- 
compatible with such a belief, as Tennyson 
points out very forcibly in the Promise of 
May. The Transcendentalism of the age, 
as explained in the Introduction, put free- 
dom into the category of the unknown and 
unknowable. Many of the most influen- 
tial writers in Ethics, writing from the 
hedonistic or evolutional points of vie^, 
denied man's power of self-determination. 
In other words, here was one of the most 
vital beliefs of man assailed on all sides by 
some of the most dominant intellectual 
forces of the age. Tennyson was aware 
of this, and was conscious of its signifi- 
cance. He took the problem up, giving it 
serious consideration, and did not fail to 
put himself on record. 

That he was deeply interested in this 
question of freedom, a careful examination 
of his poetry reveals. Such poems as 
those entitled Will^ Wages^ In Mernqriavi, 



Freedom yg 

The Idylls of the King, De Profimdis, 
Despair, The Ancient Sage, The Promise of 
May, By an Evolutionist, The Dawn, and 
TJie Making of Man, evidence this. Either 
explicitly, or by implication, they treat of 
the reality, mystery, responsibility, conse- 
quences, and goal of free-will. 

Again, there is external evidence con- 
cerning Tennyson's interest in this ques- 
tion at our command, — evidence which 
shows also that his interest was not merely 
speculative, but practical, appreciating 
the important bearing of the question on 
human life. His son informs us, that 
" Free-will and its relation to the mean- 
ing of human life and to circumstance was 
latterly one of his most common subjects 
of conversation." ^ He records, also, his 
father as saying, " Take away the sense of 
individual responsibility and men sink 
into pessimism and madness."^ Tennyson 
" wrote at the end of the poem ' Despair ' : 
* In my boyhood I came across the Cal- 

J Memoir, vol. L, p. 316. 2 ibid., p. 317, 



8o The Mind of Tennyson 

vinist Creed, and assuredly however un- 
fathomable the mystery, if one cannot 
believe in the freedom of the human will 
as of the Divine, life is hardly worth 
having.'"^ His son further says, "The 
lines that he oftenest repeated about Free- 
will were, 

' This main-miracle that thou art thou, 
With power on thine own act and on the world.' 

Then he would enlarge upon man's con- 
sequent moral obligations, upon the Law 
which claims a free obedience, and upon 
the pursuit of moral perfection (in imitation 
of the Divine) to which man is called." ^ 

Let us, then, inquire carefully into Ten- 
nyson's views on this important question. 
And first, on the question of the reality of 
free-will. An examination of his poetry 
will disclose very clearly, indeed, that he 
believed in its reality. If we turn to the 
poem entitled Will, we find him recognis- 
ing this endowment of man. His son says, 

1 Memoir, vol. i., p. 317. 2 ibid. 



Freedom 8i 

concerning the second part of this poem, 
in which the poet notes man's responsi- 
biHty for the proper exercise of this en- 
dowment, and the ill consequences which 
follow an improper use of it, that it is " one 
of the last passages I heard him recite 
about Free-will." ^ The poem reads : — 

I 
" O well for him whose will is strong ! 
He suffers, but he will not suffer long; 
He suffers, but he cannot suffer wrong : 
For him nor moves the loud world's random 

mock, 
Nor all Calamity's hugest waves confound, 
Who seems a promontory of rock, 
That, compass'd round with turbulent sound. 
In middle ocean meets the surging shock, 
Tempest-buffeted, citadel-crown'd. 

II 

" But ill for him who, bettering not with time. 
Corrupts the strength of heaven-descended Will, 
And ever weaker grows thro' acted crime, 
Or seeming-genial venial fault, 
Recurring and suggesting still ! 
He seems as one whose footsteps halt, 
Toiling in immeasurable sand, 
And o'er a weary sultry land, 

1 Memoir, vol. i., p. 318. 



82 The Mind of Tennyson 

Far beneath a blazing vault, 

Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill, 

The city sparkles like a grain of salt." 

If we examine next the little poem en- 
titled Wages, we find the reality of will — 
which means free-will — an implication of 
the poem. Here he contrasts the glory 
of warrior, orator, and song, with the 
glory of virtue — an achievement of will, 
or, more properly, will rightly exercised. 
The former are — 

" Paid with a voice flying by to be lost on an end- 
less sea" — 

but the glory of virtue is, 

" to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong." 

Indeed, she really does not aim at glory at 
all. The only wages she asks are — 
" the glory of going on, and still to be." 

Turning next to hi Menioriam, we again 
find a recognition of the reality of freedom. 
In the prologue, there is an explicit decla- 
ration of man's freedom. We are told, — 
*' Our wills are ours, we know not how ; " 



Freedom 8j 

and this declaration is repeated in explain- 
ing the object or purpose of this endow- 
ment, — 

" Our wills are ours, to make them thine." 

In poem LIV., in considering the pur- 
pose or goal of physical and moral evil, he 
again recognises the reality of will. Sin is 
here conceived of, not as mere animalism 
or bestiality, but as a wrong exercise of 
the will. In other words, he believes there 
are " sins of will." 

Again, in poem lJ^>a/., he reveals to us 
his sense of responsibility, growing out of 
his consciousness of the possession of free 
agency. 

"Yet none could better know than I, 
How much of act at human hands 
The sense of human will demands 
By which we dare to live or die." 

Again, in poem cxxxi., the reality of 
free-will receives recognition — as well as 
its immortality. It shall endure — 

" When all that seems shall suffer shock." 



84- The Mind of Tennyson 

Indeed, does not the poet in these words 
hint at a position which we have found to 
be characteristic of his teachings, namely, 
the difference between the psychical and 
the so-called corporeal or material? The 
latter is the seeming — that which seems — 
and therefore not the truly real. The 
"living will" belongs to the domain of 
the real — and it is destined to endure 
when the seeming, or phenomenal, " shall 
suffer shock." Tennyson's son informs 
us, that his father explained the words — 

" O living will that shalt endure " 

" as that which we know as Free-will, the 
higher and enduring part of man."^ 
Furthermore, in this poem, the will is 
conceived of as the purifier of our deeds, 
and he enjoins it to — 

" Rise in the spiritual rock, 
Flow thro' our deeds and make them pure." 

He also speaks here of a — 

"faith that comes of self-control," — 
1 Memoir, vol. i., p. 319. 



Freedom 8^ 

thus declaring again our self-determina- 
tion, or free-will, to be a fact. 

If we now turn our attention to The 
Idylls of ike King, we meet with the same 
teaching. In those ** spiritually central 
lines of the Idylls " it is manifest. 

" In moments when he feels he cannot die. 
And knows himself no vision to himself, 
Nor the high God a vision." 

Here he affirms the reality of God and 
man, and also, of man's immortality. Be- 
fore this, he has been speaking of moments 
when the material world, including even 
the human body, appears to belong merely 
to the world of seeming — the world of 
"vision" — the phenomenal world, and not 
to the world of reality. But man is a 
spirit — a person — 

" And knows himself no vision to himself," 

but rather as a reality, and a reality, 
too, which he feels cannot die. Now, 
Tennyson regards free-will, the " power 
over thine own act and on the world," as 



86 The Mind of Tennyson 

of the very essence of personality. This 
is evident from his poem, De Profundis, 
which will be considered later. Hence, in 
these "spiritually central lines of the 
Idylls'^ we have a recognition of man's 
power of self-determination. 

Furthermore, is not free-will a funda- 
mental implication of this entire series of 
remarkable poems "i The author, in the 
words " To the Queen " appended to the 
Idylls, says, that this " old imperfect tale, 
new-old," shadows " Sense at war with 
Soul." In other words, we have in these 
poems the story of the conflict between 
sense and spirit. " Arthur is intended to 
be a man in whom the spirit has already 
conquered and reigns supreme. It is 
upon this that his kingship rests. His 
task is to bring his realm into harmony 
with himself, to build up a spiritual and 
social order upon which his own character, 
aS the best and highest, shall be impressed. 
In other words, he works for the uplifting 
and purification of humanity. It is the 



Freedom 8y 

problem of civilization. His great enemies 
in this task are not outward and visible, — 
the heathen, — for these he overcomes and 
expels. But the real foes that oppose 
him to the end are the evil passions in the 
hearts of men and women about him. So 
long as these exist and dominate human 
lives, the dream of a perfected society 
must remain unrealized ; and when they 
get the upper hand, even its beginnings 
will be destroyed. But the conflict is not 
an airy, abstract strife ; it lies in the oppo- 
sition between those in whom the sensual 
principle is regnant and those in whom 
the spiritual principle is regnant, and in 
the inward struggle of the noble heart 
against the evil, and of the sinful heart 
against the good."^ Such a conflict, — 
such a struggle, — is a moral one. It 
involves moral choice, and moral endeavor. 
It is a matter of will, which means, as pre- 
viously stated, free-will. 

1 H. Van Dyke, The Poetry of Tennyson, icth ed., 
N. Y. 1898, pp. 198, 199. 



S8 The Mind of Tennyson 

In De Profimdis, a poem inspired by 
the birth of the poet's grandson, we have 
" the abysmal deeps of personahty " 
dwelt upon. He refers to the soul's pre- 
existence, incarnation, nature, and destiny. 
Its nature is a profound mystery. It is the 
miracle of miracles. It is of the Infinite, 
yet distinct from the Infinite. Of it we 
may say, "Thou art thou." It has a 
being-for-self. It has the power of deter- 
mining its own action, and of action upon 

things : — 

"who wrought 
Not Matter, nor the finite-infinite, 
But this main-miracle, that thou art thou, 
With power on thine own act and on the world." 

Here freedom is affirmed. Self-deter- 
mination is regarded as of the very consti- 
tution of that main-miracle of personahty ; 
— of that being " which has the power to 
feel ' I am I.' " 

In the poem Despair, Tennyson enters 
a protest against both ultra-theological and 
agnostic conceptions of God and life. 



Freedom 8g 

According to the words prefixed to the 
poem, it is based on the following incident : 
"A man and his wife having lost faith in a 
God, and hope of a life to come, and being 
utterly miserable in this, resolve to end 
themselves by drowning. The woman is 
drowned, but the man rescued by a minis- 
ter of the sect he had abandoned." The 
man almost curses the minister for rescuing 
him, and, in his remonstrance, gives reasons 
for his conduct and that of his wife. The 
bitter experiences of life drove them to 
despair. They could derive no comfort or 
encouragement from the conceptions of 
God, and man's relation to Him, presented 
in the theology of the sect to which they 
had belonged. This theology was a creed 
of Fatalism, — 

" See, we were nursed in the drear night-fold of 
your fatahst creed." 

Such a " fatalist creed " gives us a God of 
cruelty rather than a God of love, for he 
creates us, foreknows us, a.x\d foredooms us, 
and does with us as he will. — 



go The Mind of Tennyson 

" What ! I should call on that Infinite Love that 

has served us so well ? 
Infinite cruelty rather that made everlasting Hell, 
Made us, foreknew us, foredoom'd us, and does 

what he will with his own ; 
Better our dead brute mother who never has 

heard us groan ! " 

The outcome of such teaching is, a 
rejection of behef in a personal God, and 
in the reahty and immortahty of the soul. 
" Bawling " the dark side of the preach- 
er's faith flings these two back on them- 
selves, " the human heart, and the Age." 
But no hope or comfort is to be derived 
from the age, with its " horrible infidel 
writings," and its " know-nothing books." 
The times are " the new-dark ages," and 
doubt is " the lord of this dunghill." 

It is evident, then, that one of the things 
against which the poet is protesting in this 
poem is, the views of human freedom em- 
bodied in the dogmas of foreknowledge and 
foreordination of the " know-all chapel " 
with its " know-all " creed. These views 
cancel freedom, they constitute a " fatalist 



Freedom gi 

creed." Not only does the poem reveal 
this, but it is corroborated by external 
evidence. As we have already seen, he 
wrote at the end of the poem the words : 
" In my boyhood I came across the 
Calvinist Creed, and assuredly however 
unfathomable the mystery, if one cannot 
believe in the freedom of the human will 
as of the Divine, life is hardly worth hav- 
ing." In short, the import of Tennyson's 
protest against fatalism as revealed in this 
poem is, that belief in freedom is essential 
to a conception of the worth of life. 

Turning next to The Ancient Sage, we 
find freedom recognised at least by impli- 
cation. We have already seen that this 
speculative poem deals with materialistic 
and agnostic views of God and immortality. 
These conceptions are represented by a 
youth, who, in a " scroll of verse," also 
gives expression to pessimistic views of 
human life which naturally follow such 
conceptions of God and destiny. The sage 
(who represents the views of the poet) re- 



^2 The Mind of Tennyson 

plies to the youth, that human life is a trust 
put into our keeping, for which we are 
responsible, and enjoins the youth, despite 
the dark side to life, and indeed, because 
of it, to a noble life of self-control, and 
service to our fellow-men, which lies within 
the sphere of choice or self-determination. 
In response to the words of the youth, — 

" And Night and Shadow rule below 
When only day should reign," 

the sage says that if there were no night 
there would be no day, — no evil, there 
would be no good ; but that — 

" night enough is there 
In yon dark city : get thee back : and since 
The key to that weird casket, which for thee 
But holds a skull, is neither thine nor mine. 
But in the hand of what is more than man, 
Or in man's hand when man is more than man, 
Let be thy wail and help thy fellow men, 
And make thy gold thy vassal not thy king, 
And fling free alms into the beggar's bowl, 
And send the day into the darken'd heart ; 
Nor list for guerdon in the voice of men. 
A dying echo from a falling wall ; 



Freedom pj 

Nor care — for HuTiger hath the Evil eye — 
To vex the noon with fiery gems, or fold 
Thy presence in the silk of sumptuous looms; 
Nor roll thy viands on a luscious tongue, 
Nor drown thyself with flies in honied wine; 
Nor thou be rageful, like a handled bee, 
And lose thy life by usage of thy sting ; 
Nor harm an adder thro' the lust for harm, 
Nor make a snail's horn shrink for wantonness ; 
And more — think well ! Do-well will follow 

thought, 
And in the fatal sequence of this world 
An evil thought may soil thy children's blood ; 
But curb the beast would cast thee in the mire, 
And leave the hot swamp of voluptuousness 
A cloud between the Nameless and thyself, 
And lay thine uphill shoulder to the wheel, 
And climb the Mount of Blessing," etc. 

In these words we have a clear call to a 
moral choice, to a moral decision, to moral 
self-control, to moral achievement, to moral 
service to self and others. Such a call 
involves a recognition of freedom. 

In Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, we 
find another declaration of the reality of 
freedom. Man is enjoined to — 
" Follow Light, and do the Right — for man can 
half-control his doom, — " 



g^ TJje Mind of Tennyson 

which words remind us of the more em- 
phatic words to the same effect, recorded 
in The Marriage of Geraint: — 

" For man is man and master of his fate." 

The Promise of May is a poem of ethical 
import^ It was written with the purpose 
of pointing out the tendencies of material- 
istic Agnosticism, — especially as manifest 
in human character and conduct. It is a 
story of illicit love, in which Edgar (after- 
wards known as Harold) is the represen- 
tative in belief and practice of the agnostic 
" creed." With him virtue is not a reality, 

1 This play was produced at the Globe Theatre, 
November ii, 1882, under the direction of Mrs. Bernard- 
Beere. It was a complete failure. On the night of 
November 14th of the same year, as the piece was near- 
ing the close of the first act, the Marquis of Queensbury 
sprang to his feet exclaiming, " I beg to protest . . ." ; 
but adding, " I will wait till the end of the act," he re- 
turned to his seat. When the curtain had fallen he 
again stood up, and, confessing himself an agnostic, 
declared that Tennyson's Edgar was an ' abominable 
caricature ' into whose mouth the poet had put senti- 
ments that did not exist among free thinkers. — Morton 
Luce, A Handbook to the Works of Alfred Lord Tenny- 
son, pp. 411, 412. Cf. Memoir, vol. ii., pp. 266-269. 



Freedom g^ 

There is no essential distinction between 

virtue and vice. He says : — 

" one time's vice may be 
The virtue of another ; and Vice and Virtue 
Are but two masks of self ; and what hereafter 
Shall mark out Vice from Virtue in the gulf 
Of never-dawning darkness." 

So-called morals are merely slavish cus- 
toms and conventionalities. " The morals 
of the tribe " are simply the " swaddling- 
bands" of man, which, as "the child of 
evolution," he will " fling aside " as he 
moves on to a life not higher than, but in 
conformity to. Nature. Free-will, — 

" the crowd would call it conscience " — 
is a misnomer. The reality is, that we are 
determined by " the stronger motive," 
Man is merely — 

"A willy-nilly current of sensations." 

This is Edgar's creed, and, as put in 
practice by him, results in moral disaster. 
Tennyson's purpose seems to be, to protest 
against such a creed from the standpoint 
of its practical consequences. To make 



g6 The Mind of Tennyson 

man a mere child of Nature, governed only 
by mechanical laws, subject to the strong- 
est motive, — cancels morality, and reduces 
man to mere animalism. /Such a concep- 
tion of man makes Nature a liar, for what 
is the meaning of the moral emotions if 
man be not responsible for his conduct; 
and how can he be held responsible for his 
conduct if he be not free? Tennyson puts 
the case most forcefully in the words of 
Edgar: — 

" if man be only 
A willy-nilly current of sensations — 
Reaction needs must follow revel — yet — 
Why feel remorse, he, knowing that he must have 
Moved in the iron grooves of Destiny? 
Remorse then is a part of Destiny, 
Nature a liar, making us feel guilty 
Of her own faults." 

There are three poems, belonging to the 
closing years of Tennyson's life, which 
imply his belief in the reality of freedom. 
They are entitled. By an Evolutionist ; 
The Dawn, and The Making of Man. 
Tennyson believed in organic evolution. 



Freedom gy 

He believed that the human body was 
descended from a lower form of animal 
life. However, in his judgment, this is 
not so of the human soul. It is not an 
evolution of the brute mind. Men are 
not " slaves of a four-footed will," but 
beings of" heaven-descended Will." Now, 
since man is a compound being, consist- 
ing of body and soul, it is the province 
of man as " heaven-descended Will " to 
rule over man as animal-descended body. 
In other words, man as spirit ought to 
rule himself as body. This involves a 
severe struggle. The animalism in us is 
strong. " The flesh warreth against the 
spirit." But we are moral beings, with 
moral ideals, possessed of the sovereign 
power of self-determination, so that it is 
possible, by a proper exercise of will, to 
obey the exhortation, — 

" Arise and fly 
The reeling Faun, the sensual feast ; 
Move upward, working out the beast, 
And let the ape and tiger die." 

7 



g8 The Mind of Tennyson 

The soul is to hold the sceptre, and to 
rule its " Province of the brute." This is 
undoubtedly the teaching of the first of 
the poems mentioned above : — 

I 
" If my body come from brutes, tho' somewhat 
finer than their own, 
I am heir, and this my kingdom, shall the 
royal voice be mute ? 
No, but if the rebel subject seek to drag me from 
the throne, 
Hold the sceptre, Human Soul, and rule thy 
Province of the brute. 

II 

" I have climb'd to the snows of Age, and I gaze 
at a field in the Past, 
Where I sank with the body at times in the 
sloughs of a low desire. 
But I hear no yelp of the beast, and the Man is 
quiet at last 
As he stands on the heights of his life with 
a glimpse of a height that is higher." 

This, too, is the import of the second of 
the poems referred to above. The last 
two verses indicate this. Men are not 
" slaves of a four-footed will ; " but there 



Freedom gg 

are degrees of freedom. They have not 
attained unto a complete freedom from 
the power of their animality. Man in his 
moral development has only reached the 
dawn, and not the day ; but although a few 
only have reached a high level in moral 
development, we must remember "there 
is time for the race to grow." By and by 
man will reach the noon instead of the 

dawn. 

" Dawn not Day ! 

Is it Shame, so few should have climb'd from 
the dens in the level below. 
Men, with a heart and a soul, no slaves of a 

four-footed will ? 
But if twenty million of summers are stored 
in the sunlight still, 
We are far from the noon of man, there is time 
for the race to grow." 

" Red of dawn ! 
Is it turning a fainter red ? so be it, but when 
shall we lay 
The Ghost of the Brute that is walking and 

haunting us yet, and be free .'' 
In a hundred, a thousand winters ? Ah, what 
will our children be, 
The men of a hundred thousand, a million sum- 
mers away ? " 



t.«rc. 



100 The Mind of Tennyson 

The last of the three poems referred to 
above is very similar to the other two in 
regard to its real import. Man is grad- 
ually rising above his bestiality ; gradually 
moving upward from the life of the flesh 
into the richer life of the spirit. He is 
slowly " being made " ; but ultimately he 
will be made. But, if we are to interpret 
these words in accordance with Tenny- 
son's general teaching, " the making of 
man," is a process of self-making. He is 
making himself by a proper exertion of 
his free spirit under Divine guidance. 

" Where is one that, born of woman, altogether 
can escape 
From the lower world within him, moods of tiger, 
or of ape ? 
Man as yet is being made, and ere the crown- 
ing Age of ages, 
Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him 
into shape ? 

" All about him shadow still, but, while the races 
flower and fade, 
Prophet-eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on 
the shade. 



Freedom loi 

Till the peoples all are one, and all their 
voices blend in choric 
Hallelujah to the Maker 'It is finished. Man 
is made.' " 

But while freedom is a reality, — it is a 
progressive reality. There are degrees of 
freedom. The more we progress morally, 
the freer we become. " Man's Free-will 
is but a bird in a cage; he can stop at 
the lower perch, or he can mount to a 
higher. Then that which is and knows 
will enlarge his cage, give him a higher 
and a higher perch, and at last break off 
the top of his cage, and let him out to 
be one with the Free-will of the Uni- 
verse." ^ In short, Tennyson believed that 
free-will is the root of moral character; 
that moral character is a development; 
that the glory of virtue is — 

" The glory of going on, and still to be ; " 

that the progressive realisation of the 
moral ideal is a progressive realisation of 

* Memoir, vol. i., pp. 31S, 319. 



I02 The Mind of Tennyson 

freedom ; that this moral development, 
with its increasing freedom, extends into 
the immortal Hfe — the dead breathing '* an 
ampler day," " for ever nobler ends." Is this 
not the teaching of such poems as Wages, 
In Memoriam, cxviii., By an Evolutionist, 
The Dawn, and The Making of Man ? 

It is evident, then, that a review of the 
poetry of Tennyson discloses the fact 
that he believed in the reality of freedom. 
Let us now endeavor to determine his 
position with reference to the knozvable- 
ness of the reality. Very early in his 
career, in The Poet, he recognised the 
marvellous character of the will, although 

" The marvel of the everlasting will " 

lies before the superior vision of the seer 

" An open scroll." 

But the will, with Tennyson, is really an 
unknowable, inexplicable reality. This is 
quite evident in the prologue to In 
Memoriam. Here, as we have already 



Freedom loj 

seen, he affirms the reality of free-will. 
Otir wills are ours is the explicit declara- 
tion. This declaration is repeated, and a 
further affirmation of the fact is given in 
the words "to make them thine." That 
is, there is a double affirmation of the 
reality of free-will in the words, 

" Our wills are ours, to make them thine," 

because the power " to make them thine " 
is nothing else than the power of self- 
determination. But the " how " of self- 
determination is unknowable, according 
to the poet ; for, he says : — 

" Our wills are ours, we know not how." 
And this unknowableness seems to be re- 
affirmed later in the prologue, for it ap- 
pears to be a justifiable interpretation of 
the words of verse 6, — • 

" We have but faith : we cannot know," 

to apply them to free-will, as well as to 
God and immortality — the three subjects 
mentioned in the preceding verses. 

A similar position is taken by the poet 



lo^ The Mind of Tennyson 

in De Profundis. Personality, of which 
self-determination is one of the essential 
constituents, is an inconceivable reality, — 

" Who made thee unconceivably Thyself." 

It is a miracle; indeed, the "main- 
miracle," as Tennyson declares in the 

words, — 

"... who wrought 
Not matter, nor the finite-infinite, 
But this main-miracle, that thou art thou, 
With power on thine own act and on the world." 

Meagre as are his words on this sub- 
ject, are they not sufficient, when taken 
in connection with what he has said con- 
cerning the reality of free-will, to justify 
us in saying, that the poet's position in 
regard to freedom is, that it is not a 
knowable reality, but a believable one. It 
is not a fact or truth of the knowing 
mind, but of the believing soul, — a reality 
concerning which — 

"We have but faith : we cannot know." 
We believe in it largely on the authority 



Freedom jo^ 

of the " practical reason," or moral con- 
sciousness. It is necessary for the ex- 
planation of the moral life ; it is necessary 
for living the moral life. In short, free- 
dom is a practical or moral postulate. 
Tennyson's position here is essentially in 
harmony with his " Faith Philosophy," 
as we have been made acquainted with it 
in examining what he has said concerning 
our knowledge of God. God and freedom 
are " unknown and unknowable realities." 
They belong to the noumenal, to which the 
human mind, through sense and reason, 
cannot attain. But, on the other hand, 
they are believable realities, — posited by 
the believing soul. 



IMMORTALITY 

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust. 

In Memoriavt, Prologue, 3 

The face of Death is toward the Sun of Life, 
His shadow darkens earth : his truer name 
Is " Onward ! " 

The Death of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale. 

TMMANUEL KANT, in the Intro- 
-*■ duction to his famous Critique of 
Pure ReasoUy says, that there are cer- 
tain problems concerning which "reason 
prosecutes its investigations, which [inves- 
tigations] by their importance we consider 
far more excellent and by their tendency 
far more elevated than anything the under- 
standing can find in the sphere of phenom- 
ena. Nay, we risk rather anything, even 
at the peril of error, than that we should 
surrender such investigations, either on 



Immortality loy 

the ground of their uncertainty, or from 
any feehng of indifference or contempt." ^ 
And, in the second edition, he informs us 
that " these inevitable problems of pure 
reason itself are, God, Freedom, and Im- 
mortality y ^ Of these, the third occupies 
the most prominent place in Tennyson's 
reflection. All through his career as a 
poet, this problem engages his attention. 
It gives rise to his profoundest thought. 
It stirs his deepest emotion. It perplexes 
his sublimest faith. And, in his endeavor 
to " beat his music out," he gives to the 
world some of his most consummate art. 
The reasons why this problem engages 
so much of his attention have already been 
stated. We have found them to be pri- 
marily the loss of his friend, Arthur Henry 
Hallam, and the materialistic and agnostic 
tendencies of his age. Hallam was a 
young man of unusual mental endowments 

1 Critique of Pure Reason, trans, by Miiller, vol. ii., 
Int., pp. 2-3. 

2 Ibid., p. 3. 



io8 The Mind of Tennyson 

and exceedingly fine character. Through- 
out In Memoriam Tennyson speaks of him 
in the most exalted terms. ^ His was — 

" A life that all the Muses deck'd 

With gifts of grace, that might express 
All-comprehensive tenderness, 
All-subtilising intellect." 

His was — 

" High nature amorous of the good, 
But touch'd with no ascetic gloom." 

His was a — 

" manhood fused with female grace." 

Indeed, Tennyson says, he was the man he 
" held as half-divine." 

Between these two young men existed 
a peculiarly strong and affectionate friend- 
ship. The poet speaks of him as — 

" Dear as the mother to the son, 
More than my brothers are to me." 

as — 

"The human-hearted man I loved." 

1 Cf. especially poems LVii., lx., lxxii., lxxix., 

LXXXIV., LXXXV., LXXXVII., XCVI., XCIX., CIX., CX., CXI., 

cxii., and cxiii. This exalted opinion Tennyson cher- 
ished throughout his life. It was also entertained, in a 
large measure, by the mutual friends of Tennyson and 
Hallam. 



Immortality joo 

He also speaks of himself, in his relation 
to Hallam, as — 

" the divided half of such 
A friendship as had master'd Time." 

In 1832, an additional tie was formed be- 
tween the two friends. Hallam became 
engaged to Tennyson's sister Emily. The 
poet refers pathetically to this relation,^ 
and its possible outcome as bearing on his 
own life, had Hallam lived. But the mar- 
riage was never to take place. A " re- 
morseless iron hour" was destined to 
make " cypress of her orange flower," 
" despair of hope," and earth of Arthur 
Hallam. In 1833, as "the day was draw- 
ing on," while travelling on the Continent, 
Hallam fell ill with fever, to which he 
ultimately succumbed. He died in Vienna, 
September 15, of the same year. 

" My blood an even tenor kept, 

Till on mine ear this message falls, 
That in Vienna's fatal halls, 
pod's finger touch'd him, and he slept." 

1 In Memoriam, lxxxiv. 



no The Mind of Tennyson 

Now, the desire, born of the heart's 
deepest affection, that Love shall " never 
lose its own," impelled Tennyson to seri- 
ous reflection on the grounds for believing 
that it may eternally claim its object. In 
his reflection, as we have already seen, he 
had to encounter the spirit of the age, 
which was, in many respects, anything but 
encouraging to a would-be believer in 
immortality. We have noted that the 
Materialism and Sensationalism of the age 
cancelled the reality of the soul, and 
consequently its immortality. Also, that 
the Agnosticism of the age denied a 
knowledge of the soul and thereby of its 
immortality. Again, that the biblical criti- 
cism of the times weakened the confidence 
of many in the authority of the Scriptures ; 
and, as a result, their declarations concern- 
ing " the life everlasting " lost much of their 
force. It was this powerful spirit of doubt 
and denial which Tennyson had to encoun- 
ter in trying to establish himself firmly in 
a belief in man's immortal future. We 



Immortality iii 

shall see that for more than half a century- 
he fought his battle; and it is not irrever- 
ent to say, that, with both internal and 
external foes, he fought a good fight; he 
finished his course, and he kept the faith. 
The history of Tennyson's mental atti- 
tude toward the question of immortality 
may be divided into four periods. These 
are quite distinguishable, both logically 
and chronologically. The first, may be 
called the period of naive, uncritical 
behef, in which the poet rests in the 
undisturbed confidence of an inherited 
faith. The second, is when he awakes 
from the sleep of dogmatism and ex- 
periences the first rude shocks of doubt. 
The third, finds him engaged in a reflec- 
tive consideration of the question, endeav- 
oring to establish his faith on a rational 
basis in the face of his own doubts and 
those of his age. The fourth, finds him 
emerging from this long period of rational 
consideration, into the enjoyment of a 
calm and serene faith. 



IJ2 The Mind of Tennyson 

The first period — that of naive, uncriti- 
cal belief — is the period in which things 
are believed on the authority of parent, 
society, and the church. No rational 
ground for their acceptance is demanded 
— indeed, hardly dreamed of as neces- 
sary. The body of supposed religious 
truth is received as a matter of course. 
He, like thousands of others, is, so to 
speak, born into them. His father was 
a Christian minister. His mother was a 
woman of simple and earnest Christian 
faith. He was born and reared in a 
Christian land. In other words, his envi- 
ronment was Christian, He merely ex- 
emphfied human nature in receiving the 
creed of his parents, church, and country, 
at first, with most unquestioning faith. 
This is the period in which the native 
dogmatism of the mind still rules. Re- 
flection has not yet awakened it from its 
"dogmatic slumber." This simple atti- 
tude toward the question is noticeable in 
the earliest poetry of Tennyson as found 



Immortality uj 

in Poems, by Two Brothers^ — published by 
Charles Turner Tennyson and his brother 
Alfred, when the former was eighteen, 
and the latter fifteen, years of age. There 
are several poems in this volume which 
touch upon the subject of immortality. 
One of these, credited to Alfred Tenny- 
son, is entitled: Why should we Weep 
for Those who Die ? It reads as follows : 

" Why should we weep for those who die ? 
They fall — their dust returns to dust ; 
Their souls shall live eternally 
Within the mansions of the just. 

" They die to live — they sink to rise, 

They leave this wretched mortal shore ; 
But brighter suns and bluer skies 
Shall smile on them for evermore. 

" Why should we sorrow for the dead ? 
Our life on earth is but a span ; 
They tread the path that all must tread, 
They die the common death of man. 

1 Poems, by Two Brothers. London : Printed for 
W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, Stationers'-Hall-Court; 
and J. and J. Jackson, Louth. MDCCCXXVII. Copies 
of this edition are very rare. A second edition was 
published by Macmillan & Co., New York and London, 
1893. 

8 



11^ The Mind of Tennyson 

" The noblest songster of the gale 

Must cease, when Winter's frowns appear; 
The reddest rose is wan and pale, 
When Autumn tints the changing year. 

The fairest flower on earth must fade, 
The brightest hopes on earth must die : 

Why should we mourn that man was made 
To droop on earth, but dwell on high ? 

" The soul, th' eternal soul must reign 
In worlds devoid of pain and strife ; 
Then why should mortal man complain 
Of death, which leads to happier life ? " 

No questioning here as to whether " death 
ends all." He knows nothing here of the 
" sunless gulfs of doubt." No voice has 
yet murmured — 

" from the narrow house, 
The cheeks drop in ; the body bows ; 
Man dies: nor is there hope in dust." 

It is the spring-time of faith. Nothing 
but promise is seen in anything — even in 
death. 

Another poem of this early period, 
which illustrates this simple, untainted 
faith, is entitled Remorse. In the pre- 



Immortality u^ 

ceding poem it is apparent that it is 
simple Christian faith which is expressed ; 
and it is the happy side of Christian faith 
— the immortality which awaits the just. 
In this second poem he again gives ex- 
pression to his inherited Christian beliefs 
in the future life. Here, however, his 
faith embodies itself in ultra-theological 
views of the punishment which awaits the 
wicked after death. The poem describes 
the mental state of an old man as he re- 
flects upon a misspent life, and the penalty 
which the future life will bring. After 
calling attention to the mental pictures 
which arise when reviewing such a life, he 
contemplates the present and future. 

" If I am damn'd, why find I not 
Some comfort in this earthly spot ? 
But no ! this world and that to come 
Are both to me one scene of gloom ! 

And I was cursed from my birth, 

A reptile made to creep on earth, 

An hopeless outcast, born to die 

A living death eternally ! 

With too much conscience to have rest. 



ii6 The Mind of Tennyson 

Too little to be ever blest, 
To yon vast world of endless woe 
Unlighted by the cheerful day, 
My soul shall wing her weary way; 

To those dread depths where aye the same, 
Throughout the waste of darkness, glow 

The glimmerings of the boundless flame." 

Despite his misery in this world he* still 

clings to it — 

"... for well 
I know the pangs that rack me now 
Are trifles, to the endless hell 

That waits me, when my burning brow 
And my wrung eyes shall hope in vain 
For one small drop to cool the pain. 
The fury of that madd'ning flame 
That then shall scorch my writhing frame ! 

" Oh, God ! that thou wouldst grant that ne'er 
My soul its clay-cold bed forsake. 
That I might sleep, and never wake 

Unto the thrill of conscious fear ; 
For when the trumpet's piercing cry 

Shall burst upon my slumb'ring ear, 
And countless seraphs throng the sky. 

How shall I cast my shroud away. 

And come into the blaze of day ? 

How shall I brook to hear each crime, 

Here veil'd by secrecy and time. 



Immortality ny 

Read out from thine eternal book ? 
How shall I stand before thy throne, 
While earth shall like a furnace burn ? 
How shall I bear the with'ring look 
Of men and angels, who will turn 
Their dreadfiri gaze on me alone ? " 

In this poem, even after making allow- 
ance for metaphor and " poetic license," 
we have the most realistic conceptions of 
future punishment, — an exaggerated inter- 
pretation of extreme theological views. 
Some men are born to an eternal living 
death. The pangs of earth are trifles to 
what awaits those who are doomed to an 
endless and hopeless hell. There will be 
a naked revelation of crimes that have here 
been " veil'd by secrecy and time." Ab- 
solute death is more to be preferred than 
to awake to "the thrill of conscious fear" 
of an impending doom. All of this indi- 
cates that Tennyson is giving expression 
to an unexamined, unquestioned, inherited 
faith on the subject of the immortal des- 
tiny of the wicked. So that these two 
poems plainly show his first attitude 



ii8 The Mind of Tennyson 

toward the question of immortality to be 
one of naive credence, — of simple, un- 
questioning, dogmatic belief. 

And now we come to the second period 
of his mental history concerning this great 
question. But how widely different in 
character it is ! Faith has received its 
first rude encounter. The mind has been 
awakened from its " dogmatic slumber." 
It asks itself the question whether, after 
all, these things which seemed so pro- 
foundly real, were not merely the dreams 
of the soul in the sleep of dogmatism. 
The rosy visions of youthful faith are 
gone. " The spectres of the mind " have 
taken their place, and, in wretchedness 
of soul, he is trying to " lay them." He 
has entered upon the reflective period of 
life, and the penalty is disquietude of spirit. 
This period probably dawned during his 
university career, and was the result of 
gradually maturing mind, and increasing 
knowledge, as well as contact with the 
conflicting opinion and doubt of the age. 



Immortality iig 

The change in Tennyson is profound, and 
the effect on his sensitive soul is easily 
discerned in a poem, composed at this 
time, entitled Supposed Confessions of a 
Second-Rate Sensitive Mind. It is an ex- 
ceedingly pathetic utterance, — the cry of 
a soul bruised and torn by a hand-to-hand 
conflict with Doubt. An analysis of the 
poem will reveal the severity of the strug- 
gle, as well as the gloom and despair which 
have taken possession of his soul. 

It opens with a prayer to God for mercy 
in his wretched condition. He reproaches 
himself in this prayer because, despite 
God's love manifest in the sufferings and 
death of Christ, there is need of something 
more to strengthen his belief; and for 
thinking a visible sign might avail him in 
this respect. After a description of his 
misery, he breaks forth in an exclama- 
tion in which is revealed the fact, that 
it is the question of immortality concern- 
ing which he is especially in doubt. He 
says : — 



120 The Mind of Tennyson 

/*' How sweet to have a common faith ! 
To hold a common scorn of death ! 
And at a burial to hear 
The creaking cords which wound and eat 
Into my human heart, whene'er 
Earth goes to earth, with grief, not fear, 
/With hopeful grief, were passing sweet ! " 

But apparently this faith and " hopeful 
grief" are not his. There is longing for 
the " thrice happy state " of the " trustful 
infant." There is yearning for the spiritual 
quietude of his mother which, as a child, 
he discerned as he bowed at her knee and 
listened to her vows in prayer for him. 
Why is it that we get away from such in- 
fluences ? What devil had the heart to 
ruthlessly destroy the flowers of faith which 
she had reared? Is he himself that 
devil? But why have her prayers for 
him not availed, for she was " great in 
faith"? What use in praying to a 
God who does not hear; or if he hear, 
does not heed? These are the questions 
he raises, and the reflections involved dis- 
tract him. 



Immortality 121 

" Why not believe then ? Why not yet 
Anchor thy frailty there, where man 
Hath moor'd and rested? " 

But the utter hopelessness of his condition 

manifests itself in the answer he gives to 

his own question. Why not believe? 

Why not anchor my frailty there ? 

" Ask the sea 
At midnight, when the crisp slope waves 
After a tempest, rib and fret 
The broad-imbased beach, why he 
Slumbers not like a mountain tarn ? 
Wherefore his ridges are not curls 
And ripples of an inland mere ? 
Wherefore he moaneth thus, nor can 
Draw down into his vexed pools 
All that blue heaven which hues and paves 
The other ? " 

As such behavior is impossible for the 
sea, so belief is impossible for him. He is 
" forlorn " and " shaken ; " his own weak- 
ness fools his judgment, and his spirit — 

"whirls 
" Moved from beneath with doubt and fear." 

And now the poet, representing himself 
as having passed the period of youth, re- 



122 The Mind of Tennyson 

fers to the confident air with which in 
youth he went forth in the pursuit of truth ; 
and how he then justified his doubt on the 
grounds that it was a means to a noble 
end, — the firmer establishment of truth. 
Furthermore, the animal lives from mo- 
ment to moment, with no fear or suspicion 
even that life will not continue. But shall 
man, a rational, investigating mind, live 
thus? Rather — 

" Shall we not look into the laws 
Of life and death, and things that seem, 
And things that be, and analyse 
Our double nature, and compare 
All creeds till we have found the one. 
If one there be .'' " 

However well this may sound, our poet 
soon becomes conscious of the fact that it 
is not a safe course for all to pursue, him- 
self included, — at least at this period of his 
career, — and, in his wretchedness, he calls 
upon God for light. 

" Ay me ! I fear 
All may not doubt, but everywhere 
Some must clasp Idols. Yet, my God, 



Immortality izj 

Whom call I Idol ? Let Thy dove 
Shadow me over, and my sins 
Be unremember'd, and Thy love 
Enlighten me. Oh teach me yet 
Somewhat before the heavy clod 
Weighs on me, and the busy fret 
Of that sharp-headed worm begins 
In the gross blackness underneath." 

His prayer, however, fails to bring relief. 
He is left betwixt doubt and belief and 
does not know which way to turn. The 
extreme wretchedness of his state of mind is 
expressed in the final words of the poem : 

" O weary life ! O weary death ! 
O spirit and heart made desolate ! 
O damned vacillating state ! " 

This poem is undoubtedly a history of 
Tennyson's own mental struggle with 
doubt concerning the fundamental prob- 
lems of thought and hfe. More espe- 
cially, as he intimates, it represents his 
struggle with reference to the problem of 
immortality. It is a fair description of the 
experience peculiar to the mind as it 
leaves the period of authority and unques- 



124- T^^ Mind of 'Tennyson 

tioning belief and enters upon the period 
of reflection, in which it endeavors to 
rationalise its faith, — in which it seeks " to 
give a reason for the faith " that is within 
it. This often constitutes a crisis in the 
life of the soul. Two ways out of it usually 
reveal themselves. Refuge may be taken 
in authority, — putting an end to all ques- 
tioning, and resting in a blind faith. Or, 
on the other hand, as Tennyson himself 
describes it, to refuse to make the judg- 
ment blind, — to face "the spectres of the 
mind," and lay them. Tennyson adopted 
the latter course. The adoption and carry- 
ing out of this course brings us to the 
third period in the development of his 
attitude toward the problem of immortality. 
This period is one of rational inquiry 
into the grounds of belief. Serious doubts 
concerning it having arisen, — fortified by 
the scientific investigations and reflective 
thought of the age, — it was necessary for 
him to make an examination of the subject 
in the light of what science and philosophy 



Immortality 12^ 

had to say. The necessity for a personal 
investigation of the question, as before 
stated, seems to have dawned on him in 
connection with the death of his much- 
beloved friend, Arthur Hallam. Death 
usually raises the question of immortality 
in a reflective mind ; and, as previously 
suggested, the claims of Love to everlast- 
ing possession of its object, specially impel 
man to consider it. But we misinterpret 
Tennyson if we make his own satisfaction 
and peace of mind the only motive prompt- 
ing him to this inquiry. He realised before 
he had reflected long, that his cry was but 
an echo of the great cry of the human 
heart ; that his question was its question ; 
and that his answer might possibly be its 
answer. This conviction soon became an 
inspiring motive to an earnest inquiry; 
and herein do we specially see its ethical 
significance. Let us now trace the devel- 
opment of this third period.^ 

1 It is not meant, that throughout this period there 
was a non-committal attitude, — an attitude of mere con- 



126 The Mind of Tennyson 

The first evidence of such rational con- 
sideration of the subject revealed by his 
poetry is found in a poem entitled TAe 
Two Voices?- This is a philosophical 
poem. Its real subject is, " The Worth of 
Life." It consists of a series of arguments 
and counter-arguments in which the pros 

sideration of pros and cons. Sometimes, we find him 
in great perplexity of mind ; sometimes, in doubt and 
despair ; again, apparently well-grounded in faith. But 
the essential point is, that during this period of more 
than fifty years the subject is under rational consider- 
ation. He endeavors to determine the grounds of 
belief in immortality, and to proclaim and rationally 
defend the Faith. This long period may, in a sense, 
be divided into two. The first, in which he specially 
struggles with his own doubts, suggested in a measure, 
and strengthened, by the doubts of his age. This closes 
with In Memoriam, in the prologue of which he strikes 
a note of triumph — 

" Thou wilt not leave us in the dust." 

The second, is subsequent to In Memoriam, in which 
he deals more especially with the doubts of his age, 
endeavoring to make a rational defence of his belief, 
realising all of the time its vital importance as bearing 
on human life. However, this division must not be re- 
garded too literally. 

1 First published in the volume entitled English Idylls 
and Other Poems, 1842. It then bore the date of 1833, 
which, however, was removed afterward. 



Immortality 127 

and cons are skilfully presented. The 
worthlessness of life, and the advantages 
of suicide as a remedy for life's ills, are 
represented by a tempting voice. The 
value of life, and the obligation to main- 
tain it, are represented by the subject 
tempted. After the controversy, a voice 
that " sees the end," " and knows the 
good," whispers the Christian view of life. 
In the course of the discussion the poet, 
Hamlet-like, raises the question, whether, 
after all, death would put an end to misery. 
It might simply be a means of going from 
bad to worse. — 

" I toil beneath the curse, 
But, knowing not the universe, 
I fear to slide from bad to worse." 

This apprehension brings the subject of 
immortality into the discussion, and, as a 
result, we have quite an elaborate argu- 
ment for and against belief in man's im- 
mortal future. The first voice presents, 
with considerable force, the evidence from 
sense against it. So far as we can observe 



128 The Mind of Tennyson 

by the senses, the dead give no evidence 
of life. The face of the dead man is 
expressionless. It gives no indication of 
" passion, pain, or pride." Neither is there 
response to a command. No answer to a 
grasp of the hand. Smite him on the cheek 
and mouth, and he speaks not. — 

" There is no other thing express'd 
But long disquiet merged in rest." 

Indeed, the things in life which would 

most concern him, afifect him not : — 

" His little daughter, whose sweet face 
He kiss'd, taking his last embrace, 
Becomes dishonour to her race — 

" His sons grow up that bear his name, 
Some grow to honour, some to shame, — 
But he is chill to praise or blame." 

Absolute indifference to all things cosmic 

and human is his state. 

This argument from sense, however, 

does not appeal to the poet as conclusive. 

He wants to know — 

" Why, if man rot in dreamless ease, 
Should that plain fact, as taught by these, 
Not make him sure that he shall cease ? 



Immortality i2g 

" Who forged that other influence 
That heat of inward evidence, 
By which he doubts against the sense ? " 

This " inward evidence " of spirit must 
be set over against the outward evidence of 
sense. As a matter of fact, although man 
reads his body " as a thing that dies," he 
reads his spirit differently. He reads it as 
an entity surviving death. — 

"He owns the fatal gift of eyes, 
That read his spirit blindly wise, 
Not simple as a thing that dies." 

Man's aspirations reach beyond Time. 
In his heart are the forebodings of a great 
mystery. In his mind is the concept of 
Eternity. — 

" Here sits he shaping wings to fly : 
His heart forebodes a mystery : 
He names the name Eternity." 

Again, he is richly endowed. He is a 
religious, rational, and moral being. He 
has an ideal of the Perfect. Nowhere 
in Nature is it actualised. Does it carry 
us beyond Nature to the Supernatural? 
9 



/JO The Mind of Tennyson 

He is a being who has conceptions of God 
and of his relations to Him ; who can 
reflect on his own origin and destiny; who 
has ideals of moral worth, and can impose 
them upon himself as laws of conduct; a 
being " so God-like in faculty," must have 
a nobler destiny than the dust. — 

" That type of Perfect in his mind 
In Nature can he nowhere find, 
He sows himself on every wind." 

" He seems to hear a Heavenly Friend, 
And thro' thick veils to apprehend 
A labour working to an end. 

" The end and the beginning vex 
His reason: many things perplex, 
With motions, checks, and counterchecks. 

" He knows a baseness in his blood 
At such strange war with something good, 
He may not do the thing he would." 

Furthermore, man has a kind of spir- 
itual vision of the immortal life : — 

" Heaven opens inward, chasms yawn, 
Vast images in glimmering dawn. 
Half shown, are broken and withdrawn." 



Immortality iji 

All of this constitutes the " inward evi- 
dence " of spirit which leads man to doubt 
the outward evidence of sense. The poet 
thinks the unbeliever slain by his own 
weapon, — Doubt; that the fact that man 
doubts against the outward evidence of 
sense, constitutes a pre-supposition in favor 
of belief in immortality. 

But the unbeliever resumes. There is 
other evidence which makes against belief 
in immortality. ** To begin, implies to 
end." Man has had a beginning; he 
must, therefore, have an end. Whatever 
force this thesis may have, — and the poet 
thinks it has very little, — is offset, in his 
judgment, by the intimations which man 
has of his pre-existence, — that he was not, 
at least, first cast " in human mould." 
This is merely dreaming and not argu- 
ment to the sceptic, and he shrewdly 
calls attention to the main question under 
consideration — The Worth of Life — by 
pointing to something which is not a 
dream but a reality. — 



JJ2 The Mind of Tennyson 

" ' I talk,' said he, 
' Not with thy dreams. Suffice it thee 
Thy pain is a reality.' " 

The poet, however, is not convinced 
by the gloomy representations of the un- 
believing voice that life is not worth liv- 
ing, and closes the discussion with the 
affirmation of a fact which is regarded by 
many as constituting one of the strongest 
grounds for belief in the soul's immor- 
tality; namely, that it is not death, but 
life — larger, fuller, completer life — which 
man desires. — 

" Whatever crazy sorrow saith, 
No life that breathes with human breath 
Has ever truly long'd for death. 

" T is life, whereof our nerves are scant, 
Oh life, not death, for which we pant; 
More life, and fuller, that I want." 

Some light on the subjective or personal 
character of this poem may be gained 
from the following words contained in the 
Memoir: ^ "When I wrote The Tzvo 

1 Vol. i. p. 193 n. 



Immortality ijj 

Voices" says Tennyson to his son, " I was 
utterly miserable, a burden to myself and 
to my family, that I said, * Is life worth 
anything?' " We have seen above what a 
conspicuous place immortality occupies in 
his answer to the question raised ; hence, 
undoubtedly, the earnest consideration of 
the subject which this poem reveals. 

The next evidence of such rational con- 
sideration of the question in his poetry, is 
found in In Mejuoriam. Very naturally 
we expect to find the fullest development 
of his thought here ; and, indeed, a care- 
ful examination of this great work brings 
no disappointment in this respect. We 
find here the same consideration of the 
pros and cons which is manifest in The 
Tivo Voices, but the reflection is more 
profound. 

Tennyson himself has explained the 
nature of the poem. He said: "It must 
be remembered that this is a poem, not an 
actual biography. It is founded on our 
friendship, on the engagement of Arthur 



7j^ The Mind of Tennyson 

Hallam to my sister, on his sudden death 
at Vienna, just before the time fixed for 
their marriage, and on his burial at Cleve- 
don Church. The poem concludes with 
the marriage of my youngest sister Cecilia. 
It was meant to be a kind of Divina Corn- 
media, ending with happiness. The sec- 
tions were written at many different places, 
and as the phases of our intercourse came 
to my memory and suggested them. I did 
not write them with any view of weaving 
them into a whole, or for publication, 
until I found that I had written so many. 
The different moods of sorrow as in a 
drama are dramatically given, and my 
conviction that fear, doubts, and suffering 
will find answer and relief only through 
Faith in a God of Love."^ 

The reflective consideration of the ques- 
tion of immortality in In Memoriam be- 
•i gins with poems xxxiv.-xxxv.^ Here the 

1 Memoir, vol. i. pp. 304, 305. 

2 It is very difficult, if not, indeed, impossible, 
to determine the chronological order of the poems of 
/« Memoriam. -Their composition covers a period 



Immortality /J5 

poet affirms immortality to be an inference 
based upon human life itself. If life is to 
be crowned by death, if it is not to " live 
for evermore," then earth is a dark and 
meaningless affair. This is the teaching 
of life itself. — 

" My own dim life should teach me this, 
That life shall live for evermore, 
Else earth is darkness at the core, 
And dust and ashes all that is ; 

" This round of green, this orb of flame, 
Fantastic beauty ; such as lurks 
In some wild Poet, when he works 
Without a conscience or an aim." 

Such a conception or supposition as this 

means a Godless world, and this means 

the collapse of the religious nature, — the 

destruction of religious ideals. With an 

earth that is " darkness at the core," whose 

beauty is " fantastic " rather than rational ; 

with " dust and ashes all that is," what 

does "God" mean to the human soul? 

This is why the poet asks the question, — ■ 

" What then were God to such as I ? " 

of seventeen years. In the above treatihent the usual 
order of the poems has been followed. 



1^6 The Mind of Tennyson 

Furthermore, this means the worthless- 
ness of life itself. Mortal things are hardly- 
worth the choosing. The virtue of pa- 
tience, even in a small measure, is not 
worth exercising. Indeed, life is really 
not worth living, — it were better, at once, 
to cease to be. — 

" 'T were hardly worth my while to choose 
Of things all mortal, or to use 
A little patience ere I die ; 

" 'T were best at once to sink to peace, 
Like birds the charming serpent draws. 
To drop head-foremost in the jaws 
Of vacant darkness and to cease." 

Again, Love were an impossibility, if 
death were seen at first merely as death. 
Or, if possible, it would be an exceedingly 
poor, narrow, sluggish, and coarse affair, 
scarcely rising above brutish passion. 
This, to the poet, is an important consid- 
eration. He puts the case thus : Sup- 
pose "some voice that man could trust" 
would tell him that death means ex- 
tinction. Still it might be said, that it is 



Immortality ijy 

worth while even here to strive " to keep 
so sweet a thing " as Love alive. But 
consciousness of the mortality of Love 
as involved in his own mortality would 
lessen its sweetness. It would become 
even in life a " half-dead " affair. He 
then adds : — 

" O me, what profits it to put 

An idle case ? If Death were seen 
At first as Death, Love had not been, 
Or been in narrowest working shut, 

" Mere fellowship of sluggish moods, 
Or in his coarsest Satyr-shape 
Had bruised the herb and crush'd the grape, 
And bask'd and batten'd in the woods." 

After numerous indications of his faith 
in immortality in various poems of In 
Memoriain ^ which follow those just con- 
sidered, we meet again with a rational 
consideration of the subject in poems 
Liv., LV., and LVI. Here we have a 
supreme struggle in which the poet sum- 

1 Poems xxxviir., XL., XLi., XLii., xliii., xliv., 

XLV., XLVI., XLVII., L., LI., LIL 



ij8 The Mind of Tennyson 

mons his best energies. He reveals to us 
the fact that he has been considering the 
destiny of man in the light of Nature. 
Tennyson looked at Nature usually 
through the eyes of Science. He de- 
scribes his age as one — 

" When Science reaches forth her arms 

To feel from world to world, and charms 
Her secret from the latest moon." 

Probably she can feel her way into the 
dark " valley of the shadow of death," 
and charm the secret of the grave. It 
may be that she can give an answer to 
the great question, " If a man die, shall 
he live again ? " So he turns to Nature, 
and makes his appeal. He reflects upon — 

" The wish, that of the Hving whole 
No life may fail beyond the grave," 

and asks whether it may not be traced to 
the divine in man, — 

" The likest God within the soul." 

But inquiring of Nature, he finds her testi- 
mony not to be in harmony with this 



Immortality ijg 

wish. Her story is one of destruction and 
death, and thus gives rise to the suspicion 
of a conflict between God and herself. 
She, indeed, seems to be " careful of the 
type," but indifferent to, or " careless of 
the single life." Often, of fifty attempts 
at fruitage, only one succeeds. Death 
thwarts the others. Such wholesale de- 
struction and apparent waste are appalling 
to the poet. They cause him to falter 
where he firmly trod. This divine wish 

that — 

" No life shall fail beyond the grave," 

gets no support from Nature ; nay, the 
evidence which she furnishes is overwhelm- 
ingly against it. So he comes to the con- 
clusion that the question which he has 
raised is really too large for human 
reason. All that he can do is " to 
stretch lame hands of faith." — 

" The wish, that of the living whole 
No life may fail beyond the grave, 
Derives it not from what we have 
The likest God within the soul ? 



/^o The Mind of Tennyson 

" Are God and Nature then at strife, 
That Nature lends such evil dreams? 
So careful of the type she seems, 
So careless of the single life ; 

"That I, considering everywhere 
Her secret meaning in her deeds, 
And finding that of fifty seeds 
She often brings but one to bear, 

" I falter where I firmly trod, 

And falling with my weight of cares 
Upon the great world's altar-stairs 
That slope thro' darkness up to God, 

" I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, 
And gather dust and chaff, and call 
To what I feel is Lord of all, 
And faintly trust the larger hope." 

But he decides to inquire further of 
Nature on this important subject. As 
a matter of fact, she is " careless of the 
single life ; " but it is said she is " careful 
of the type." But is this really so ? The 
statement hardly seems to be substanti- 
ated by the evidence. The facts rather 
indicate the contrary. Nature is even 
careless of the type; for — 



Immortality i^i 

*' From scarped cliff and quarried stone ^--- 

She cries, ' A thousand types are gone : 
I care for nothing, all shall go.' " 

No immortality of the individual; no 
immortality of the species. This seems 
to be the teaching of Nature. So far as 
this throws light on human immortality, 
it strongly indicates the improbability of 
either a personal or race immortality. 
And, as though this answer of Nature 
were not sufficiently sweeping, she con- 
tinues mercilessly: — 

" ' Thou makest thine appeal to me : 
I bring to life, I bring to death : 
The spirit does but mean the breath : 
I know no more.' " 

But, discouraging as is this response 
to his appeal, the poet is loath to let the 
matter rest here. He is not satisfied. 
All that Nature has revealed thus far in 
her answer to his inquiry may be true of 
other beings, but is it true of man — her 
last and supreme work — so wonderful in 
mature and achievement? Is this all that 



i^ The Mind of Tennyson 

science can say of the destiny of a be- 
ing who stands on the very summit of 
creation; whose eyes glow with "splen- 
did purpose;" whose powerful religious 
instincts impel him to "roll the psalm" 
even "to wintry skies," — to put his 
trust in God as Love, and in Love as 
God's law, despite the fact that Nature, 
red with the blood of the conflict of 
ages, shrieks against his creed? Is this 
all that science can say of the destiny of 
him who loves and suffers; who has 
moral ideals, and battles " for the True, 
the Just?" Is it possible that such a 
being — so exalted in creation, so dig- 
nified in being, so noble in endeavor — 
has no other destiny than to — 

" Be blown about the desert dust, 
Or seal'd within the iron hills "? 

If so, then, indeed, is man "a monster," 
" a discord ; " then, too, is life as " futile " 
as it is "frail." The words of the poet are 
very earnest and impressive, revealing 



Immortality i^j 

how profoundly interested in, and how 
deeply he feels, concerning Nature's re- 
sponse to his important appeal. — 

" ' So careful of the type ? ' but no. 

From scarped cliff and quarried stone 
She cries, ' A thousand types are gone : 
I care for nothing, all shall go. 

" ' Thou makest thine appeal to me : 
I bring to life, I bring to death : 
The spirit does but mean the breath : 
I know no more.' And he, shall he, 

" Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair, 
Such splendid purpose in his eyes. 
Who roU'd the psalm to wintry skies, 
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer, 

" Who trusted God was love indeed 
And love Creation's final law — 
Tho' Nature, red in truth and claw 
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed — 

" Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills. 
Who battled for the True, the Just, 
Be blown about the desert dust, 
Or seal'd within the iron hills ? 

" No more? A monster then, a dream, 
A discord. Dragons of the prime. 
That tear each other in their slime, 
Were mellow music match'd with him. 



i^^ The Mind of Tennyson 

" O life as futile, then, as frail ! 

O for thy voice to soothe and bless ! 
What hope of answer, or redress ? 
Behind the veil, behind the veil." 

Passing now to poem LXXXII.,^ we 
find the poet reflecting again upon the 
subject of human immortahty. We have 
here a presentation of at least a quasi- 
argument for behef in the future life. 
There is an " Eternal Process," and man 
is involved in it Death does not stop 
the onward march of the spirit. It is 
rather a means of furthering its progress. 
'"" The body, of course, is mortal, and re- 
turns to dust. But these remains are but 
" the shatter'd stalks " or " ruin'd chrys- 
alis " of a being progressing from state 
to state. Death may bear — 

" The use of virtue out of earth : " 

but the poet knows that — 

" transplanted human worth 
Will bloom to profit, otherwhere." 

1 Poems LX., LXi., lxii., lxiii., lxiv., lxv., lxvi., 
LXXV., and Lxxxi., indicate belief in immortality. 



Immortality 7^5 

Poem CXVIII.,^ presents a new phase of 
the old argument based on the dignity 
of human nature, and its place in crea- 
tion. The law of " the solid earth's " for- 
mation has been the law of evolution — 
the law of progress from the lower to the 
higher, until at last " arose the man ; " 
who, if he typify this great law of Time, 
is himself not only — 

" The herald of a higher race," 

but also — 

" of himself in higher place.'' 

When we remember this great progres- 
sive movement of Nature, and that man 
is involved in it, we must believe in the 
immortality of human love and truth ; 
that the dead " breathe an ampler day," 
" for ever nobler ends." 

And now we find the poet considering 
the argument against belief in immortality. 
In three poems he reveals his reflections 

1 Poems Lxxxiv., lxxxv., xc, xci., xcii., xciir., 
xciv., xcv., cxvi., and cxvn., are indicative of belief 
in immortality. 

ID 



14-6 The Mind of Tennyson 

upon the claims of Materialism, Panthe- 
ism, and one form of the argument from 
Sense. In poem CXX., he deals with 
Materialism. Materialistic science denies 
the reality of a distinct entity or agent 
called the mind or soul. All psychic 
activity is really, in the final analysis, 
merely a higher form of cerebral activity. 
All mind activity is brain activity. Hence, 
ultimately considered, we are merely " cun- 
ning casts in clay." The conclusion is 
evident and inevitable. When death 
breaks these casts, only unformed clay 
remains. From unformed clay we came ; 
of organized clay we are ; to disorganized 
clay we return. This, undoubtedly, is 
Tennyson's interpretation of the view of 
man taken by materialistic science. Un- 
fortunately, he does not meet these views 
in his wonted manner. In the Introduc- 
tion, attention was called to the fact of his 
unwillingness to " make his judgment 
bUnd." Here, however, we find an in- 
stance of deviation from his customary 



Immortality i^y 

attitude of mind. \ Science mdiy prove this 
materialistic conception of the origin and 
nature of man, with its necessary implica- 
tions concerning his destiny. But that 
makes no difference to our poet; he is 
resolved to take a higher view, in spite of 
proof to the contrary. It is one of the 
very few instances in all of Tennyson's 
reflections, as revealed by his poetry, in 
which he manifests a willingness to take 
refuge in blind faith.^ He says : — 

" I trust I have not wasted breath : 
I think we are not wholly brain. 
Magnetic mockeries ; not in vain, 
Like Paul with beasts, I fought with Death ; 

" Not only cunning casts in clay : 

Let Science prove we are, and then 
What matters Science unto men. 
At least to me ? I would not stay. 

" Let him, the wiser man who springs 
Hereafter, up from childhood shape 
His action like the greater ape, 
But I was born to other things." i 

1 Another instance may be found in poem cxxiv., 
3.4- 



14-8 The Mind of Tennyson 

As in the preceding poem, so in poem 
CXXIII., we find him reflecting on the 
evidence which makes against an immor- 
tal future for man. Here, as in The Two 
Voices, only in different form, it is the 
testimony of sense. It is the great fact 
of change. Everything changes and 
seems to come to naught. He considers 
this perishable nature of things in its 
bearing upon belief in the imperishable 
nature of the soul. Does it not indicate 
the soul's mortality — that it, too, comes 
and goes, and is no more? Transiency 
is written on the face of all things ; why 
not on the soul? The last verse of the 
poem indicates that this is really the ques- 
tion which engages his thought. It indi- 
cates also, that, despite the fact of universal 
change, he will not believe it involves the 
soul's destruction. 

"There rolls the deep where grew the tree. 
O earth, what changes hast thou seen ! 
There where the long street roars hath been 
The stillness of the central sea. 



Immortality i^g 

" The hills are shadows, and they flow 

From form to form, and nothing stands ; 
They melt like mist, the solid lands, 
Like clouds they shape themselves and go. 

*• But in my spirit will I dwell. 

And dream my dream, and hold it true ; 
For tho' my lips may breathe adieu, 
I cannot think the thing farewell." 

In poem cxxx. , he reflects upon the 
Pantheistic doctrine of absorption into the 
Infinite after death. This doctrine is, 
of course, opposed to personal immortality. 
It cancels the individuality of the finite 
spirit by remergence " in the general 
soul." It is an interesting and rather 
singular thing to note, that a conception 
which Tennyson had previously emphati- 
cally rejected as — 

" faith as vague as all unsweet," 

affirming that the boundary lines of per- 
sonality shall be preserved, that — ■ 

" Eternal form shall still divide 

The Eternal Soul from all beside, 
And I shall know him when we meet," ^ 

1 Poem XLVii. 



1^0 The Mind of Tennyson 

should afterward be, at least, temporarily 
accepted, as is manifest in this poem. 
We cannot agree with Mr. Morton Luce, 
that the poem must be interpreted from 
the standpoint of poetic license. The 
affirmations which it contains are too bold 
and positive for that. Already in the 
preceding poem he mingles "all the 
world " with his friend ; and here Arthur's 
voice is affirmed to be "on the rolling 
air ; " he is heard " where the waters run ; " 
he is declared to be in the rising and set- 
ting sun; he seems to be felt as "some 
diffusive power" "in star and flower;" 
and, as though the identification with 
"the All" is not sufficient, in the above 
affirmations, he proceeds a step farther, 
and declares his departed friend to be 
"mixed with God and Nature." The 
poem seems to be an expression of a 
temporary mood or faith of the poet rather 
than a licensed poetical expression. Tem- 
porary faith, it must be said, because it 
does not reflect any permanent belief on 



immortality i^i 

his part. It is opposed to the general 
tendency of his thought and belief, as we 
have already seen, and as will be manifest 
after further investigation. — 

" Thy voice is on the rolling air ; 

I hear thee where the waters run ; 
Thou standest in the rising sun, 
And in the setting thou art fair. 

" Where art thou then ? I cannot guess ; 
But tho' I seem in star and flower 
To feel thee some diffusive power, 
I do not therefore love thee less : 

" My love involves the love before ; 
My love is vaster passion now ; 
Tho' mixed with God and Nature thou, 
I seem to love thee more and more." 

Immediately following the above canto 

comes that superb declaration of his belief 

in personal immortality, expressed in the 

words : — 

" O living will that shalt endure 
When all that seems shall suffer shock." 

The reflective consideration of the 
question of immortality, so far as/« Mem- 
oriam is concerned, ends with the poem 



1^2 The Mind of Tennyson 

quoted above, with the exception of the 
prologue, which, as previously stated, was 
probably one of the last written. Here 
we find another ground for belief pre- 
sented. The poet, after considering the 
question for seventeen long years, breaks 
forth in a declaration of confidence that 
death does not end all, and bases_this con- 
fidence on the justice of God. — 

" Thou madest Life in man and brute ; 
Thou madest Death ; and lo, thy foot 
Is on the skull which thou hast made. 

" Thou wilt not leave us in the dust : 

Thou madest man, he knows not why, 
He thinks he was not made to die ; 
And thou hast made him : thou art just." 

The full significance of these words can 
only be understood as we read them in 
the light of what he has said elsewhere on 
the same subject. In June, 1871, he 
wrote a letter of condolence to Mrs. Elm- 
hirst, his friend from childhood, whose 
son had recently died. In it he says: 
" You cannot catch the voice, or feel the 



Immortality /jj 

hands, or kiss the cheek, that is all; a 
separation for an hour, not an eternal 
farewell. If it were not so, that which 
made us would seem too cruel a Power to 
be worshipped, and could not be loved, 
but I trust you believe all this," ^ etc. In 
an extract from Queen Victoria's private 
Journal, dated Aug. 7, 1883, we have the 
same attitude indicated. We are told here 
that in conversation with Her Majesty, " he 
spoke with horror of the unbelievers and 
philosophers who would make you believe 
there was no other world, no Immortality, 
who tried to explain all away in a miser- 
able manner. We agreed that were such a 
thing possible, God, who is Love, would be 
far more cruel than any human being." ^ 

This prologue, coming at the end of his 
long struggle with doubt, is very refresh- 
ing indeed. There is a calm, dignified, 
but triumphant tone which shows that the 
poet has come oiit of the long conflict 
strengthened in faith. — 

1 Memoir, vol. ii., p. 105. ^ Ibid. 457. 



75^ The Mind of Tennyson 

" Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds, 
At last he beat his music out." 

" He fought his doubts and gather'd strength, 
He would not make his judgment blind, 
He faced the spectres of the mind 
And laid them : thus he came at length 

" To find a stronger faith his own." 

Henceforth we find him more especially 
maintaining the Faith against the seri- 
ous doubts of his age. 

From hi Memoriam we pass to the cele- 
brated Idylls of the King.^ Tennyson un- 
folds to us the real import of the Idylls 
in his words "To the Queen," which he 
appends to the poems : — 

" accept this old imperfect tale, 
New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul." 

These poems portray the conflict between 
the sensuous and the spiritual in man. 

1 There is a reference to immortality in Majid, pt. i., 
sec. xviii., div. 7. Mr. Luce interprets the words as 
follows: "The thought appears to be twofold: ist, 
' The approach of death should make us dearer to 
each other ; ' 2nd, ' But death is immortality, and im- 
mortality alone can make love perfect.'" — A Hand- 
book to the Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, p. 316, n. 



Immortality zj-j- 

The bearing of the Idylls on the subject 
under consideration is seen in the words 
of the King, at the close of The Holy 
Grail. He tells his knights what are the 
duties of the King ; and then of the visions 
which arise after those duties have been 
performed. These visions take him be- 
yond the world of sense into the spiritual 
realm, — the world of the real. Here 
the spirit comes in contact with itself, 
with its Spiritual Cause, and with its 
spiritual destiny. It perceives itself as 
actual, rather than phenomenal. It per- 
ceives God as Reality, rather than as 
vision. It apprehends itself not "as a 
thing that dies," but as a being immortal. 
The King speaks: — 

" ' And some among you held, that if the King 
Had seen the sight he would have sworn the vow : 
Not easily, seeing that the King must guard 
That which he rules, and is but as the hind 
To whom a space of land is given to plow. 
Who may not wander from the allotted field 
Before his work be done ; but, being done, 
Let visions of the night or of the day 



j^6 The Mind of Tennyson 

Come, as they will ; and many a time they come, 
Until this earth he walks on seems not earth, 
This light that strikes his eyeball is not light, 
This air that smites his forehead is not air 
But vision — yea, his very hand and foot — 
In moments when he feels he cannot die. 
And knows himself no vision to himself, 
Nor the high God a vision, nor that One 
Who rose again. ' " 

Has Tennyson, in all of the superb crea- 
tions of his genius, ever given us anything 
finer than this? These are the lines 
which he pronounced "the (spiritually) 
central lines of the Idylls ; " ^ and, so far 
as they bear on our subject, they declare 
that there are supreme moments in the 
life of the soul v^rhen it intuits its own 
immortality, — moments when it feels it- 
self to be not a perishable, temporal thing, 
but an imperishable, immortal spirit; 
moments when it feels it cannot die. 

Passing from the Idylls to the volume 
entitled Tiresias, and other Poems, "^ we 

1 Memoir, vol. ii., p. 90. 

2 Published 1885. The volume entitled Ballads, 
and other Poems, published 18S0, has several refer- 



Immortality 757 

meet with a poem, — The Charge of the 
Heavy Brigade at Balaclava.^ In the 
Epilogue there is a positive declaration 
of Tennyson's belief in immortality, with 
a semi-argumentative presentation of the 
same. He affirms the vanity of deed and 
song, if man be not immortal; and that 
man's moral achievements will continue 
as a moulding force in the life after death. 
The Epilogue is a poem favoring peace 
rather than war. It represents a conver- 
sation between Irene (Greek word for 
Peace) and a poet. Irene tells the poet 
that he will never set his name — 

" A star among the stars," 

by praising that which should be blamed, 
namely, "The barbarism of wars." The 
poet replies that he has been misun- 
derstood. He wants wars to cease. He 
merely contends that it is right to crown 

ences to immortality. However, they are not important 
for our purpose. They occur in Rizpah, The Sisters, 
Dedicatory Poem to the Princess Alice, and De Pro- 
fun dis. 

1 First published in Macmillan's Magazine, i88l. 



1^8 The Mind of Tennyson 

the warrior's noble deeds with song. He 

hopes the crown may last, but affirms that — 

" Song will vanish in the vast." 

Irene objects to this affirmation, and the 
poet yields to the objection, modifying 
his previous statement by saying, that 
"deed and song" will pass away and be 
in vain, unless "man himself remain." 
And, says the poet, remain he will, and 
so will his moral achievement, serving to 
mould him in the life beyond the grave. — 

" Let it live then — ay, till when ? 

Earth passes, all is lost 
In what they prophesy, our wise men, 

Sun-flame or sunless frost, 
And deed and song alike are swept 

Away, and all in vain 
As far as man can see, except 

The man himself remain ; 
And tho', in this lean age forlorn, 

Too many a voice may cry 
That man can have no after-morn, 

Not yet of these am I. 
The man remains, and whatsoe'er 

He wrought of good or brave 
Will mould him thro' the cycle-year 

That dawns behind the grave." 



Immortality i§g 

If, in the next place, we turn to Tire- 
sias, we find Tennyson, in the Epilogue, 
postulating immortality on the ground of 
the uselessness of life, if man be not im- 
mortal. In 1883, Tennyson sent this 
poem, " dating many years ago, " to Edward 
Fitzgerald,^ an old friend. It was found 
by his son Hallam " in some forgotten 
book " of the poet. It was published in 
the volume of 1885, already referred to. 
The Epilogue is very touching. It refers 
to the death of Fitzgerald, or "old Fitz," 
as Tennyson fondly called him. Referring 
pathetically to their friendship, he says, — 

" Gone into darkness, that full light 

Of friendship ! past, in sleep, away 
By night, into the deeper night ! 

The deeper night ? A clearer day 
Than our poor twilight dawn on earth — 

If night, what barren toil to be ! 
What life, so maim'd by night, were worth 

Our living out? Not mine to me 
Remembering all the golden hours 

Now silent, and so many dead. 
And him the last." 

1 The translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. 



i6o The Mind of Tennyson 

In this volume of 1885 is contained also 
The Ancient Sage. The nature of this 
speculative poem has already been ex- 
plained, and a partial analysis of it given 
so far as it bears on the problem of the 
being and nature of God. But the poem 
also deals with the question of immor- 
tality. The agnostic and materialistic 
youth presents his views on this subject 
in the "scroll of verse," and the sage 
replies to them. In our previous analysis 
we had reached the point where the 
youth recognises no other Deity than 
Time, and he proceeds to call attention 
to its destructive power, insinuating that 
eventually man must succumb to it and 
be no more. He presents, in a very for- 
cible manner, the argument of change, as 
manifest in the gradual decline of man's 
powers : — 

".' The statesman's brain that sway'd the past. 
Is feebler than his knees ; 
The passive sailor wrecks at last 
In ever-silent seas ; 



Immortality i6i 

The warrior hath forgot his arms, 

The Learned all his lore ; 
The changing market frets or charms 

The merchant's hope no more; 
The prophet's beacon burn'd in vain, 

And now is lost in cloud ; 
The plowman passes, bent with pain, 

To mix with what he plow'd ; 
The poet whom his Age would quote 

As heir of endless fame — 
He knows not ev'n the book he wrote, 

Not even his own name. 
For man has overlived his day, 

And darkening in the light, 
Scarce feels the senses break away 

To mix with ancient Night.'" 

But, says the sage in reply, — 

" The shell must break before the bird can iiy," 

The decline and dissolution of the body 
merely liberate the spirit. But the 
youth in the scroll continues: — 

" ' The years that when my Youth began 
Had set the lily and rose 
By all my ways where'er they ran, 

Have ended mortal foes ; 
My rose of love for ever gone. 
My lily of truth and trust — 



i62 The Mind of Tennyson 

They made her lily and rose in one, 

And changed her into dust. 
O rose tree planted in my grief, 

And growing, on her tomb, 
Her dust is greening in your leaf, 

Her blood is in your bloom. 
O slender lily waving there, 

And laughing back the light. 
In vain you tell me " Earth is fair " 

When all is dark as night.' " 

But, says the sage, this is a misinterpre- 
tation of the work of Time. Man is im- 
mortal, and awaits "the second state 
sublime," when he can view this work of 
Time from the standpoint of " the last and 
largest sense." This sense will reveal to 
him the true interpretation, — "that the 
world is wholly fair." 

" My son, the world is dark with griefs and graves, 
So dark that men cry out against the Heavens. 
Who knows but that the darkness is in man ? 
The doors of Night may be the gates of Light ; 
For wert thou born or blind or deaf, and then 
Suddenly heal'd, how would'st thou glory in all 
The splendours and the voices of the world ! 
And we, the poor earth's dying race, and yet 
No phantoms, watching from a phantom shore. 



Immortality i6j 

Await the last and largest sense to make 
The phantom walls of this illusion fade, 
And show us that the world is wholly fair." 

Perusing the scroll again, the sage finds 
it still affirming the mortality of man : 

" For all that laugh, and all that weep 
And all that breathe are one 
Slight ripple on the boundless deep 
That moves, and all is gone." 

But, says the sage, in reply, man is 
conscious of his immortality in his very 
relation to this "boundless deep." 

" But that one ripple on the boundless deep 
Feels that the deep is boundless, and itself 
For ever changing form, but evermore 
One with the boundless motion of the deep." 

And, at the suggestion of the scroll, that 
"the darkness of the pall" should be for- 
gotten in wine and golden music, the 
sage takes occasion to remark, that not 
only the darkness associated with life, but 
also that associated with death is a misin- 
terpretation. There are stars that shine 
in the night. There are some, too, that 



7<5^ 77?^ Mind of Tennyson 

never set, but pass beyond the range of 
mortal vision " to lose themselves in day. " 
There is a happier and worthier view of 
death. "The dead are not dead." They 
live, and their lot is a higher and happier 
one than ours. Therefore, they should 
be borne "to burial or to burning," not 
on the black bier which stands for nega- 
tion, but in white, — 

" With songs in praise of death, and crown'd with 
flowers ! " ^ 

But there is continued affirmation in 
the scroll of man's mortality. 

" O worms and maggots of to-day 
Without their hope of wings ! " 

" Tho' some have gleams or so they say 
Of more than mortal things." 

The sage confesses himself to be one of 
those who have had such "gleams." 
They have given him an insight into that 
which lies beyond "the gates of birth and 

^ It would be difficult to find anything more hopeful 
and cheerful than this in all literature. 



Immortality i6^ 

death." Pre-existence and immortality 
have been revealed to him by these 
"gleams." Of the gleams of the immor- 
tal life he says : — 

" for more than once when I 
Sat all alone, revolving in myself 
The word that is the symbol of myself, 
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed, 
And past into the Nameless, as a cloud 
Melts into Heaven. I touch'd my limbs, the 

limbs 
Were strange not mine — and yet no shade of 

doubt, 
But utter clearness, and thro' loss of Self 
The gain of such large life as match'd with ours 
Were Sun to spark — unshadowable in words, 
Themselves but shadows of a shadow- world." 

Tennyson here, in the reply of the sage, 
is referring to a personal experience 
which constituted for him a ground for 
believing in the soul's immortality. It 
was a trance experience which was not 
uncommon with him. He refers to it in 
the ninety-fifth poem of In Memoriam. 
In the experience there described he was 
brought into contact with the spirit of 



1 66 The Mind of Tennyson 

the dead. He came face to face also with 
the real — the Eternal — and had a pro- 
found sense of his own immortality. He 

" came on that which is, and caught 
The deep pulsations of the world," 

" .(Eonian music measuring out 

The steps of Time — the shocks of Chance 
The blows of Death." 

In the description given in TJie Ancient 
Sage, he tells us that — 

" The mortal limit of the self was loosed," — 

and he entered upon — 

" such large life as match'd with ours 
Were Sun to spark." 

We have still another description of 
this trance experience in words of Tenny- 
son recorded in the Memoir: ^ " A kind of 
waking trance I have frequently had, quite 
up from boyhood, when I have been all 
alone. This has generally come upon 
me thro' repeating my own name two or 
three times to myself silently, till all at 

1 Vol. i., p. 320. 



Immortality i6y 

once, as it were out of the intensity of the 
consciousness of individuality, the indi- 
viduality itself seemed to dissolve and 
fade away into boundless being, and this 
not a confused state, but the clearest of 
the clearest, the surest of the surest, the 
weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond 
words, where death was an almost laugh- 
able impossibility, the loss of personality 
(if so it were) seemed no extinction but 
the only true life." ^ 

These "gleams" of pre-existence and 
immortality, these gleams "of more than 
mortal things," are merely " idle gleams " 
to the youth, as the scroll reveals. They 
are transient "but the clouds remain." 
But what are idle gleams to the youth are 
"light" to the sage; and he urges the 
youth to forsake the life of the flesh — the 
lower life of selfishness — which clouds 
the spiritual vision; and enjoins him to 
enter upon the moral life — the higher life 
of service to self and others; then, climb- 

1 This is a close approach to Pantheism. 



i68 The Mind of Tennyson 

ing the Mount of Blessing, perchance he 
may catch a glimpse of immortality, he 
may see, "past the range of Night and 
Shadow," — 

" The high-heaven dawn of more than mortal day 
Strike on tlie Mount of Vision ! " 

In Locksley Hall Sixty Years After ^ 
there is a fine passage expressing Tenny- 
son's faith in immortality, with more or 
less of a justification of it. He calls it 
"the leading light of man." He com- 
ments on the universality of the belief; 
and finally affirms that such noble traits 
of human character as goodness, truth, 
purity, and justice "crumble into dust," 
if we rob them of immortality. — 

" Truth, for Truth is Truth, he worshipt, being 
true as he was brave ; 
Good, for Good is Good, he follow'd, yet he 
look'd beyond the grave, ^ 

1 Probably written shortly before iS86, and pub- 
lished in the volume, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, 
and other Poems, 1886. Dated 1887. 

2 Probably descriptive of his son Lionel. Cf. 
Memoir, vol. ii., p. 329. 



Immortality i6g 

" Wiser there than you, that crowning barren 
Death as lord of all, 
Deem this over-tragic drama's closing curtain is 
the pall ! 

" Beautiful was death in him, who saw the death, 
but kept the deck, 
Saving women and their babes, and sinking with 
the sinking wreck, 

" Gone for ever ! Ever ? no — for since our dying 
race began. 
Ever, ever, and for ever was the leading light of 
man. 

" Those that in barbarian burials kill'd the slave, 
and slew the wife 
Felt within themselves the sacred passion of the 
second life. 

" Indian warriors dream of ampler hunting grounds 
beyond the night ; 
Ev'n the black Australian dying hopes he shall 
return, a white. 

" Truth for truth, and good for good ! The Good, 
the True, the Pure, the Just — 
Take the charm ' For ever ' from them, and they 
crumble into dust." 

And one of the last couplets of this poem 
embodies the injunction: — 



ijo The Mind of Tennyson 

" Follow Light, and do the Right — for man can 
half-control his doom — 
Till you find the deathless Angel seated in the 
vacant tomb." 

On Dec. 13, 1889, when Tennyson 
was eighty years old, appeared his volume 
entitled Demcter and other Poems. There 
are several poems in this volume which 
merely indicate Tennyson's belief in 
immortality, such as The Ring, and By an 
Evolutionist. But there is one which is 
of great interest as marking probably the 
close of this third stage or moment in the 
development of his thought on immortality, 
— the period of rational consideration. 
The poem is entitled Vastness. It is a 
most emphatic reiteration of a "reason" 
for belief in the future life which was very 
influential with Tennyson. This reason 
or ground of belief is the absolute vanity, 
the utter uselessness and meaningless- 
ness of all things if man be not immor- 
tal. Politics, stately purposes, valor in 
battle, glorious annals, martyrdom for the 



Immortality jyi 

right, pain and pleasure, wealth and pov- 
erty, fame and love, the loss of the flesh 
and the conquest of the spirit; spring 
and summer, autumn and winter; old and 
new-old revolutions; philosophies and 
sciences; poetry and prayer, — what do all 
these things amount to, what meaning do 
they have, what purpose do they serve, — 

"if we all of us end but in being our 
own corpse-coffins at last, 
Swallow'd in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown'd in 
the deeps of a meaningless Past ? 

" What but a murmur of gnats in the gloom, or a 
moment's anger of bees in their hive ? " 

If man's end is the grave, then, indeed, 
are vanity and worthlessness written on 
the face of all things human. Nothing is 
more apparent to the poet than this, and 
it seems as though, after a long period of 
argument with himself and his age, he 
means to close the discussion with an 
emphatic re-statement of the fact, and an 
affirmation, that "the dead are not dead, 
but alive." 



iy2 The Mind of Tennyson 

Thus, in this long stretch of years, 
extending from 1833 to 1889, — covering 
fifty-six years of the poet's life, — do we 
find him earnestly reflecting on the ques- 
tion of human destiny. During this long 
period the question receives rational con- 
sideration, — the evidence for and against 
belief in immortality being carefully 
weighed. Sometimes he rests in the 
favorable evidence as though he had 
reached a permanent attitude. Then, 
such evidence seems to lose its force, and 
the opposing evidence rests heavily upon 
his mind. Sometimes reason catches a 
glimpse of "more than mortal day." 
Again, it is enveloped in the darkness 
of everlasting night. 

During this period he has fully consid- 
ered the argument from sense. The dead 
man's face indicates naught of "passion, 
pain, or pride." Calm indifference to all 
things cosmic and human is his state. 
The poet has seen change and decay 
written on the face of Nature. Things 



Immortality lyj 

come and go. Nothing abides. Man's 
body returns to the dust. Yea, even his 
mental powers decline and ultimately fail. 
Transiency is the law of all things — 
minds included. 

During this period he has also con- 
sidered the claims of Scepticism. All 
things finite have had a beginning 
and must therefore have an end. "To 
begin implies to end." Genesis in- 
volves Nemesis. Man is no exception 
to the rule. He also has had a be- 
ginning. To affirm his pre-existence is 
to talk of dreams. He, therefore, falls 
under the law. His extinction is in- 
volved in his generation. 

This period also reveals the poet con- 
sidering the claims of Materialism. All 
so-called psychic phenomena are nothing 
more than higher forms of neural motion. 
Man is "wholly brain," and as such, is so 
completely identified with Nature as to be 
her product. Like all physical things, 
then, he is subject to change and dissolu- 



//^ The Mind of Tennyson 

tion. Being merely a "cunning cast in 

clay," he ultimately breaks and returns to 

earth. The poet has questioned Nature 

on this point and has found her answer to 

be in harmony with these claims. Her 

only reply is : — 

" I bring to life, I bring to death : 

The spirit does but mean the breath : 
I know no more." 

During this period he has also dwelt on 
the claims of Pantheism. Man, after all, 
has but a phenomenal existence. He is 
merely a mode of the activity of the Abso- 
lute. He seems to have a being of his 
own; but it is no more distinct from the 
being of the Absolute than is the being 
of the wave or billow from that of the sea. 
At death this particular mode of the 
Absolute's being is cancelled. The 
billow loses its apparent individuality by 
being absorbed by the sea. So man 
loses his apparent reality by being " mixed 
with God and Nature," or by "remer- 
gence in the general soul." He is ab- 



Immortality 775 

sorbed by and into the Infinite. Hence 
there is no personal immortality. 

And finally, during this period, he also 
considered the claims of Agnosticism, 
There are limits to man's knowledge. 
These limits are constitutional — imposed 
on him by the constitution of mind itself. 
Knowledge is limited to the phenomenal; 
it does not extend to the noumenal. The 
soul and its immortality belong to the 
latter realm. Because of mental impo- 
tency, then, man is shut out from a 
knowledge of his own immortality. We 
cannot know. This is the only true and 
becoming attitude for man to take toward 
this great question. 

On the other hand, the poet, during this 
long period, has considered also the evi- 
dence in favor of belief in immortality. 
Very early in this period he set the " in- 
ward evidence" of spirit over against the 
outward evidence of sense : — 

I. Man aspires after a nobler destiny 
than the dust. He sits, "shaping wings 



1^6 The Mind of Tennyson 

to fly." There are forebodings of a mys- 
tery in his heart. The name Eternity is 
upon his lips. 

2. Man is a religious, rational, and 
moral being. Does not an investiture 
of this character link him to the super- 
natural and make him an heir of immor- 
tality? A being so divine in nature — 
who has the conception of a God and of 
his relation to him ; who reasons about a 
beginning and an end; who distin- 
guishes between right and wrong, and is 
conscious of moral obligation, — such a 
being cannot perish with the body. 

3. Once more, man has peculiar inti- 
mations of his immortality. — 

" Heaven opens inward, chasms yawn. 
Vast images in glimmering dawn, 
Half shown, are broken and withdrawn." 

4. Again, the very fact that man 
doubts his own mortality in spite of the 
evidence to the contrary, constitutes a 
pre-supposition in its favor. At least, it 
destroys the force of the unbeliever's 



Immortality lyy 

argument, for he is slain by his own 
weapon, which is doubt. 

5. And, finally, man does not long for 
death, — absolute extinction. What he 
wants is life, — a larger, fuller, richer, 
completer life. Why should not this su- 
preme yearning of the soul be satisfied.? 

But the poet does not rest in this evi- 
dence. A little later he considers other 
"reasons" for belief: — 

6. Life itself should teach us that if 
man is not immortal, then earth to its 
innermost centre is darkness, — an abso- 
lutely unintelligible reality, — possessing 
no meaning whatever. This implies a 
Godless world and the destruction of all 
religious ideals; for, under such circum- 
stances, what does G'c^a^mean to the human 
soul } 

7. Again, life would lose its signifi- 
cance on the basis of such a supposition. 
It would be worthless — not worth the 
living. Indeed, 'twere better to cease 
to be at once. 

12 



lyS The Mind of Tennyson 

8. Again, love, the supreme emotion of 
the human heart, were an impossibility 
on such an hypothesis. Or, if possible, 
it could scarcely rise above the sensual 
passion of the brute. 

9. Again, not only does man's supe- 
riority of endowment argue his immortal- 
ity, as already pointed out, but the glory 
and worth of his character and achieve- 
ment really entitle him to it. Does not 
a being who worships God under adverse 
circumstances, who trusts God as Love, 
and Love as "Creation's final law," 
despite the cruel and bloody course of 
nature, deserve immortality.-' Does not 
a being who reveals "splendid purpose," 
who loves, who suffers, who battles for 
lofty ideals, — "the True, the Right," — 
deserve a nobler destiny than to — 

" Be blown about the desert dust, 
Or seal'd within the iron hills ? " 

If not, then this being is "a monster," 
"a dream," "a discord," and his life is as 
"futile" as it is "frail." 



Immortality lyg 

10. Again, the great cosmic process 
indicates man's immortality. It does this 
in two ways : («) Evolution is the order 
of the world's on-going. Progress from 
the lower to the higher seems to be the 
cosmic order of procedure. Man himself 
is involved in this cosmic order. Hence 
he, too, moves from a lower to a higher 
state. True to this order of the universe, 
he is "the herald of himself in higher 
place." But {b) man stands at the head 
of creation. He is Nature's supreme 
work. All of her work preceding the 
coming of man was preparatory to his 
advent. In view of this stupendous prep- 
aration, man must have a greater career 
than is implied in threescore years and 
ten. He must " breathe an ampler day " 
than this, "for ever nobler ends." 

11. Again, Justice is a fundamental 
attribute of Deity. To create a being 
who desires immortality, who yearns for 
life, — higher, richer, completer life, — 
and then fail to satisfy his yearning, is 



i8o The Mind of Tennyson 

irreconcilable with God's justice. To 
cancel such a being's existence is out of 
all harmony with the essential nature of 
God. 

12. Again, there are times when the 
soul intuits its own immortality. They 
come with the consciousness of duty per- 
formed. They are the supreme moments 
in the life of the spirit, when it stands 
face to face with reality — with the real- 
ity of God; with the reality of self; with 
the reality of its own immortality. Mo- 
ments when man — 

" feels he cannot die, 
And knows himself no vision to himself, 
Nor the high God a vision." 

13. Again, the belief in man's immor- 
tality is not only universal, but it is also 
the essential condition of human progress. 
There are certain fundamental virtues 
which lie at the foundations of all social 
order and condition its progress. These 
are Goodness, Truth, Purity, and Justice. 
They are human attributes. Were we to 



Immortality i8i 

rob them of immortality, they would 
"crumble into dust." 

14. Again, there are super-normal expe- 
riences in the life of the soul which throw 
light on this great question, — experiences 
when "the mortal limit of the Self" is 
loosed and the soul is carried "beyond the 
gates of birth and death." To one who 
has had such experiences, the claims of 
mortality seem absurd. In such a trance 
there is a — 

"gain of such large life as match'd with ours 
Were Sun to spark — unshadowable in words." 

These are the considerations which 

make for belief in immortality. They are 

the reasons for faith which Tennyson gave 

to himself and to others during fifty-six 

years of serious reflection. He did not 

present them as constituting a proof or 

demonstration of the soul's immortality. 

He believed rather that immortality, like 

God and freedom, belonged to — 

" The truths that never can be proved 

Until we close with all we loved, 
And all we flow from, soul in soul." 



i82 The Mind of Tennyson 

Indeed, at one time he did not regard 

some, at least, of the above " reasons " 

as closing "grave doubts and answers," 

but as merely the work of sorrow, whose 

"care is not to part and prove," making 

doubt subservient to love, loosing — 

" from the lip 
Short swallow-flights of song, that dip 
Their wings in tears, and skim away." 

He says emphatically in The Ancient 
Sage — 

" Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no 
Nor yet that thou art mortal." 

Immortality is neither a truth of sense 
nor of understanding, but of faith, where- 
fore we are enjoined to "cling to Faith." 
But this faith is a rational, not a blind 
faith. It is based on reason ; and Tenny- 
son, during these fifty years and more, 
has been trying "to give a reason for the 
faith," — to unfold its rational character 
— with the results recorded above. It 
is evident, then, that he takes the same 
attitude toward immortality that he takes 



Immortality i8j 

toward God and freedom, viz. : that it is 
not a truth of knowledge, but of faith. 

And this brings us to the fourth 
period in the history of Tennyson's atti- 
tude toward this vital question. This is 
the attitude of comparatively undisturbed 
repose in the belief in man's immortality. 
He has fought his own doubts and the 
doubts of his age for more than half a 
century. He has gained the victory over 
personal doubt and has done valiant ser- 
vice in defence of the Faith. He is 
now at peace. This is already manifest 
in Demeter and other Poems, especially in 
the beautiful lyric, Crossing the Bar, em- 
bodying a more beautiful faith. ^ For 
him, as revealed by this poem, the grave 

1 Tennyson's son says : " ' Crossing the Bar ' was 
written in my father's eighty-first year, on a day in 
October when we came from Aldworth to Farringford. 
Before reaching Farringford he had the Moaning of the 
Bar in his mind, and after dinner he showed me this 
poem written out. 

" I said, ' That is the crown of your life's work. ' He 
answered, ' It came in a moment.' He explained the 
'Pilot' as 'That Divine and Unseen who is always 
guiding us.'" — Memoir, vol. ii. pp. 366, 367. 



i84- The Mind of Tennyson 

has lost its victory and death has lost its 
sting. The poet wants "no sadness of 
farewell " when he embarks upon the sea 
whose flood may bear him far "from out 
our bourne of Time and Place; " because, 
he says, — 

" I hope to see my Pilot face to face 
When I have crost the bar." 

Death is merely "that which drew from 
out the boundless deep," turning home 
again. 

This calm and peaceful faith is further 
manifest in the last volume of his poems, 
entitled, The Death of CEnone, Akbar' s 
Dream, a7id other Poems. This volume 
was published a few weeks after his 
death, which occurred Oct. i6, 1892. 
Here we meet with the poem entitled 
Faith, which is undoubtedly expressive 
of the faith of the poet. Death will fling 
open "the gates that bar the distance," 
and the immortal life will bring with it 
worthier conceptions of the character of 



Immortality i8^ 

God than those expressed by human creeds. 
Even here there " comes a gleam of what 
is higher." 

" Neither mourn if human creeds be lower than the 

heart's desire ! 
Thro' the gates that bar the distance comes a 

gleam of what is higher. 
Wait till Death has flung them open, when the 

man will make the Maker 
Dark no more with human hatreds in the glare of 

deathless fire ! " 

Here, too, there is the little poem, The 
Silefit Voices, which reveals his thought 
as pushing forward into the future life. 
There is almost an impatient yearning to 
enter into its realities. He cares more 
for "the heights beyond" than for "the 
lowland ways behind." 

" When the dumb Hour, clothed in black, 
Brings the Dreams about my bed, 
Call me not so often back, 
Silent Voices of the dead. 
Toward the lowland ways behind me, 
And the sunlight that is gone ! 
Call me rather, silent voices, 



i86 The Mind of Tennyson 

Forward to the starry track 
Glimmering up the heights beyond me 
On, and always on ! " 

Again, in the poem entitled, God and 
the Universe, he reveals a calm and dig- 
nified faith. His son informs us, that 
several hours before his father's death 
he exclaimed, "I have opened it." The 
son adds: "whether this referred to the 
Shakespeare opened by him at 

' Hang there like fruit, my soul, 
Till the tree die,' 

which he always called among the tender- 
est lines in Shakespeare : or whether one 
of his last poems, of which he was fond, 
was running through his head I cannot 
tell " 1 God and the Universe is the poem 
referred to. After asking, — 

" Will my tiny spark of being wholly vanish in 

your deeps and heights ? 
Must my day be dark by reason, O ye Heavens, 

of your boundless nights, 
Rush of Suns, and roll of systems, and your fiery 

clash of meteorites ?" 

1 Memoir, vol. ii. pp. 427, 428. 



Immortality iSy 

he answers : — 

" Spirit, nearing yon dark portal at the limit of thy 

human state, 
Fear not thou the hidden purpose of that Power 

which alone is great, 
Nor the myriad world, His shadow, nor the Silent 

Opener of the Gate." 

And, finally, in TJie Death of the Duke 
of Clarence and Avondale, we have a splen- 
did declaration of the poet's faith in the 
words : — 

" The face of Death is toward the Sun of Life, 
His shadow darkens earth : his truer name 
Is ' Onward,' no discordance in the roll 
And march of that Eternal Harmony 
Whereto the worlds beat time, tho' faintly heard 
Until the great Hereafter." 

Thus, in all of these poems, he strikes 
a clear note. There is no wavering of 
faith. It remains sure and steadfast. 
His own doubts have vanished. He has 
sailed " the sunless gulfs of doubt " of 
his age and has issued into a sunlit sea 
of faith. For him, " utter darkness " 
does not close the day. Far out beyond 



i88 The Mind of Tennyson 

" A hundred ever-rising mountain lines, 
And past the range of Night and Shadow" 

he sees — 

" The high-heaven dawn of more than mortal day 
Strike on the Mount of Vision ! " 

Is it any wonder, after such a long period 
of earnest consideration of the question 
of immortality, culminating in such a 
serene personal faith, that the poet, a 
few days before his death, should make 
the request of his son, "Mind you put 
' Crossing the Bar ' at the end of all 
editions of my poems " ? ^ Is not his 
meaning clear? Is not the request a 
communication to the world of his belief 
in the " life everlasting " ? And how 
surpassingly beautiful is the belief which 
is expressed, as well as the manner of its 
expression ! — 

" Sunset and evening star, 
And one clear call for me ! 
And may there be no moaning of the bar, 
When I put out to sea, 

1 Memoir, vol. ii. p. 367. 



Immortality i8g 

" But such a tide as moving seems asleep, 
Too full for sound and foam, 
When that which drew from out the boundless 
deep 
Turns again home. 

" Twilight and evening bell, 
And after that the dark ! 
And may there be no sadness of farewell, 
When I embark ; 

" For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place 
The flood may bear me far, 
I hope to see my Pilot face to face 
When I have crost the bar." 



INDEX 



Akbar's Dream, 7. 
Alexander, A., 76 n. 
Alford, 5. 
Ancient Sage, The, 3, 28, 31, 

33. 42, 51 n-, 58. 71, 79, 9I' 

i5o, 166, 1S2. 
" Apostles," Society of, 4, 50. 
Argyll, Duke of, 7. 
Arnold, T., 18. 

Ballads, and other Poems, 

i56n. 
Bentham, 4. 
Berkeley, 4, 5, 43, 67. 
Bradley, Mrs., j^- 
Browning, 8, 30 n. 
Butler, 4. 
By an Evolutionist, 4, 79, 96, 

102, 170. 

Carlyle, 30 n. 

Charge of the Heavy Brigade 

at Balaclava, 157. 
Clough, A. H., II n. 
Crossing the Bar, 183, 184, 

188. 

Dante, 8. 

Dawn, The, 4, 79, 97, 102. 

Darwin, 13. 

De Profundis, 2, 42 n., 71, 76, 

79, 86, 88, 104, 157 n. 
Death of the Duke of Clarence 

and Avondale, 106, 187. 



Death of CEnone, Akbar's 
Dream, and other Poems, 
184. 

Dedicatory Poem to the Prin- 
cess Alice, 157 n. 

Demeter, and other Poems, 
170, 183. 

Descartes, 4, 28, 43. 

Despair, 3, 79, 88. 

Doubt and Prayer, 54, 59. 

English Idylls, and other 

Poems, 126 n. 
Elmhirst, Mrs., 152. 

Faith, 54, 56, 184. 
Ferrier, 5. 
Fichte, 5. 

Fitzgerald, E., 159. 
Fraser, 5. 
Froude, 6. 

God and the Universe, 54, 72, 

185, 186. 
Goethe, 8. 

Hallam, a. H., 9, 26, 107, 

108 n, 109, 125, 134. 
Hamilton, 29. 
Hegel, 5. 

Higher Pantheism, The, 2, 64. 
Hobbes, 4. 
Hodgson, 5. 
Holy Grail, The, 155. 



ig2 

Human Cry, The, 51. 
Hume, 4, 14 n. ^ 
Hutton, 5. 
Huxley, 5, 45. 

Idylls of the King, 2, 79, 85, 
86, 154, 155, 156, 

In Memoriam, i, 2, 10, 31, 33, 
42, 46, 52, 56, 58, 76, 78, 82, 
102, 103, 106, 108, 126 n, 
1.13. 134, 137, 151. 154, 165. 

JOWETT, 7. 

Jacobi, 29. 

Kant, 4, 5, 16, 17, 29, 43, 106. 

Lecky, 7. 
Locke, 4, 43. 
Locker-Lampson, F. 7, 63, 73, 

74- 
Locksley Hall Sixty Years 

After, 93, 168. 
Locksley Hall Sixty Years 

After, and other Poems, 

168 n. 
Lubbock, Sir J. 5. 
Luce, M., 94 n., 150, 154 n. 
Lucretius, 8. 
Lushington, E., 6. 

Making of Man, The, 4, 79, 

96, 102, 
Hansel, 29. 

Marriage of Geraint, The, 94. 
Martineau, 5, 6. 
Maud, 154 n. 
Maurice, F. D., 5, 19. 
Merlin and the Gleam, 24. 
Metaphysical Society, 5, 64. 
Milton, 8. 
Mivart, 5. 



Index 



Mozley, 5. 
Miiller, 10711. 

Newman, 18. 

Palace of Art, The, 2. 
Poems, by Two Brothers, 113. 
Poet, The, 102. 
Princess, The, 42 n. 
Promise of May, The, 3, •]%, 
79, 94- 

Remorse, 114. 
Ring, The, 170. 
Rizpah, 157 n. 
Robertson, C, 5. 
Robertson, F. W., 19. 
Ruskin, 5. 

Sand, George, 23. 

Schlegel, 5. 

Sellwood, Miss E., 60. 

Shakespeare, 8, 1S6. 

Shelley, 8. 

Sidgwick, 5. 

Silent voices. The, 185. 

Sisters, The, 157 n. 

Socrates, 10. 

Sophocles, 8. 

Spencer, H., 28. 

Spinoza, 5. 

Stanley, 5. 

Supposed Confessions of a 

Second-Rate Sensitive Mind, 

I, 119. 

Tennyson, Charles Turner, 

113- 

Tennyson, Hallam Lord, 4, 159. 
Tennyson, Lady, 60. 
Tennyson Society of Philadel- 
phia, 26. 



Index 



193 



Tiresias, 159. 

Tiresias, and other Poems, 156. 

Two Voices, The, 2, 126, 133, 

135; 148. 
Tyndall, 5, 6, 7. 

Van Dyke, H., S; n. 
Vastness, 3, 170. 
Victoria, Queen, 153. 
Voltaire, 23. 



Wages, 78, 82, 102. 
Weld, Miss, 33. 
Whately, iS. 

Why Should we Weep for 
Those who Die? 113. 

Will, 78, 80. 
Wordsworth, 8. 



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